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Panama Past and Present 




RUINS OF THE CATHEDRAL TOWER, OLD PANAMA 



Panama 
Past and Present 



By 



Farnham Bishop 




New York 
The Century Co. 

1916 






Copyright, 1913, 1916, by 
The Century Co. 



Published February, 1913 
Revised Edition, October, 1916 



ST 



OCT 25 1916 

©CI,A44532i 



«''9 DEDICATION 

To the Old Admiral, white and frail. 

Red Indian, swarthy Cimaroon, 
Conquistadores brave in mail, 

Beneath the blaze of tropic noon, 
To Morgan's swaggering bucaneers, 

To gallant Nunez and his men ; 
To Goethals and his engineers, 

Who cleft the peaks of Darien. 



INTRODUCTION 

IT is eminently fitting that this book should appear at 
the present time. No more suitable occasion for a 
popular treatise on the Panama Canal can be imagined 
than the eve of the opening of the greatest trade route 
known in the history of the world. 

A study of this noteworthy undertaking is of especial 
value to us because this is an American achievement, 
projected by the people of the United States through 
their representatives at Washington; paid for from the 
revenues of this nation; accomplished by the grit, 
sagacity, and perseverance of some of the greatest 
Americans of this generation. We are not intelligent 
if we are uninformed on such a subject; we are unwise if 
we fail to appreciate its significance; we are unpatriotic 
if we do not applaud the doings of such citizens. 

Clarence A. B^odeur. 

State Normal School, 
Westfield, Mass. 



Vlll 



PREFACE 

THIS book has been made possible by the kind 
assistance of many friends, to whom the author 
wishes to express his deepest gratitude. First and fore- 
most, thanks are due to his father, Joseph BuckHn 
Bishop; who, ever since he became Secretary of the 
Isthmian Canal Commission, has been the official source 
of information for all who have either written or lectured 
about the Isthmus of Panama. Colonel Goethals and 
the men under him, from gang-foremen to divisional 
engineers, have been uniformly courteous and helpful. 
The librarians of Harvard University, the New York 
Historical Society, and the New York Public Library, 
have given every facility for historical research. Special 
thanks are due to the publishers of The World's Work, 
St. Nicholas, and the Harvard Illustrated Magazine, 
for permission to republish parts of articles written for 
them; and to Professor Kemp of Columbia University 
for authoritative information concerning the geologic 
formation of the Isthmus, and the closing of the prehis- 
toric Straits of Panama. 

It is hoped that this book will appeal to the average 
boy, as it is mainly about the two things that interest 



X Preface 

him most : fighting and machinery. Limitation of space 
has forced the omission of many interesting details : how 
Balboa's bloodhound, Leoncillo or the '' little lion," could 
tell a hostile from a friendly Indian, and was entered on 
the muster-roll as a man-at-arms ; how the aged Spanish 
admiral leapt into the sea to save his sailors who had 
been blown overboard by the explosion of a jar of gun- 
powder, in the fight with Ringrose's bucaneers ; how a 
fleet of smugglers bombarded Porto Bello, to be revenged 
on the custom-house officers; how a Scotch soldier of 
fortune captured the city of Colon with a railroad train; 
or how an of^cer of the United States Navy arranged 
and refereed a battle between Panamanians and Colomb- 
ians across the tracks of the Panama Railroad, in 1901. 
It would take a book many times the size of this to tell 
a tenth of the wonderful story "of Panama. 

Farnham Bishop, 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Geographical Introduction 3 

II How Columbus Sought for the Strait . 36 

III How the Spaniards Settled in Darien . 48 

IV How Nunez de BalbOxV Found the South 

Sea 57 

V How Pedrarias the Cruel Built Old Pan- 
ama 64 

VI How Sir Francis Drake Raided the Isth- 
mus . 70 

VII How Morgan the Bucaneer Sackec Old 

Panama 78 

VIII How THE English Failed to Take New 

Panama 88 

IX How the Americans Built the Panama 

Railroad 98 

X How THE French Tried to Dig the Canal . 114 

XI How Panama Became a Republic . . ; 130 

XII How THE Isthmus Was Made Healthy . 150 

XIII How We Are Building the Canal . . .168 

XIV How We Live on the Isthmus To-day . . 195 
XV How General Goethals Has Made Good . 218 

XVI What the Future May Bring Forth . . 229 
XVII The Opening of the Canal 251 

APPENDIX 

Columbus and Limon Bay 259 

Matachin . 259 

Panama and the Pan-American Railroad 260 
Spillway, Gatun Dam 260 

xi 



xii Contents 

PAGE 

Piece of Eight 256 

Value of the $40,000,000 French Purchase 256 

Canal Work, May i, 1912 257 

Canal Statistics 258 

Panama Canal Toll Rates 262 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Ruins of the Cathedral tower, Old Panama . Frontispiece 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

Isthmian Canal Commission Map showing Isthmus with 

completed canal 4 

Area of heated rock in Culebra Cut 7 

Mangoes 9 

Gaillard Cut, looking north 1 1 

Man O'Warsman 14 

The flat arch in the ruins of San Domingo Church, 

Panama City 16 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

The " Holy Ghost Orchid " .19 

Armadillo 21 

Iguana .22 

Crocodile 22 

Bridge at the entrance to Old Panama ..... 24 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

San Bias Indians in various costumes , .... 27 

San Bias Indian squaws 28 

Part of the Chagres River ... .^ .... 3° 

Map of Five Canal Routes 33 

Cross-section of proposed ship tunnel, San Bias route . 35 

Statue of Columbus at Madrid 37 

Chorerra, a typical town in the interior of the Republic 

of Panama 39 

Caravel 4^ 

Ruin at Porto Bello 45 

Americus Vespucius ......•.••• 49 

Old Spanish fort at Porto Bello ........ 53 

xiii 



xiv List of Illustrations 

PAGE 

" Nombre de Dios " — street scene . . . . . .55 

Entrance to old Spanish fort at Porto Bello . . .60 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

Balboa 62 

Pieces of Eight 66 

" Nombre de Dios " — street scene '^2 

Sir Francis Drake o . . 73 

Natives preparing rice for dinner — '' Nombre de Dios " 74 

San Bias Indian Squaws in native dress 76 

Galleon 79 

A Biicaneer 82 

Arms of the Old City of Panama . 84 

By permission of The Bancroft Company. 

Sea Wall, Panama City 90 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

Rented graves, cemetery, Panama City 95 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

Surveying for the Panama Railroad in 1850 .... 99 

Panama Railroad in 1855 . . . . . . " , . . loi 

French locomotives and machinery 104 

Gatun Station 106 

San Pablo Station . 108 

French dredges tied up to the bank after the collapse 

of the de Lesseps Company 109 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

Terminus at Panama 112 

Colombia National Flag . . 115 

Count de Lesseps in 1880 118 

By permission of S. S. McClure, Ltd. 

Dredge abandoned by the French and repaired by the 

Americans 120 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

French method of excavation in the Gaillard Cut . . 125 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

Christening the flag of the Republic of Panama after 

the revolution of 1903 132 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 



List of Illustrations xv 



PAGE 



Colombian barracks" and garrison in Panama City 

shortly before the revolution of 1903 . . . .136 

From a photograph bj' Marine, Panama. 

Concrete bridge on Zone highway 141 

Panama National Flag 144 

Quarantine Station on Culebra Island in the Bay of 

Panama 145 

Coat of Arms of the Republic of Panama .... 147 
General William C. Gorgas . . . . . . . .152 

By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co. 

Sanitary squad cleaning Panama City . . . . .156 

Yellow fever group 161 

The old water department of Panama 164 

Finished section of Gaillard Cut at Bas Obispo . . . 171 

Gatun Dam, Spillway and Locks 173 

Gatun Locks 175 

Sectional View of a Lock as high as a six-story building 177 

Pedro Miguel Locks . . . 179 

A bird's-eye view of one of the ninety-two Panama 

" bull-wheels " . . . . . . . . . . .181 

Cross-section of Lock Chamber and walls of Locks . 182 
Relocating the Panama Railroad . . . . . . .186 

Lidgerwood Flats being unloaded, Balboa Dumps, low 

tide, March, 1908 . 191 

A Spreader on Balboa Dumps, low tide, March, 1908 . 191 

Model of Pedro Miguel Locks 193 

Street of married quarters at Pedro Miguel . . . .198 
Typical dining-room in Isthmian Canal Commission 

Hotel 199 

Shifting track by hand 202 

Track shifting machine 202 

Seal of the Canal Zone 205 

A Squad of mounted Zone-police in front of the Ancon 

Hospital 209 

Parrott rifle, on the Sea Wall, Panama City . . . .214 

From a photograph by L. Maduro, Jr., Panama. 



xvi List of Illustrations 

PAGE 

National Institute or University of the Republic of 

Panama 216 

Cross-section of the Isthmus on Canal route . . . . 219 

The Brain Wagon 222 

By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co, 

General George Washington Goethals . . . . . 223 

Steam shovel loading flat cars 227 

Steam shovel hauling a large boulder 227 

The Gatun Locks 234 

Building Pedro Miguel Locks 239 

A Lighthouse in the jungle 246 

The Panama Canal Medal 248 

General View of Gatun Locks 250 

Collapsible steel form for casting culvert in Lock Wall 250 

The Dredging Fleet at Cucaracha 252 

U. S. S. Ohio Passing Cucaracha SHde, July 16, 1915 254 

Pedro Miguel Locks 255 

Gatun Spillway regulating works 261 

National Palace of the Republic of Panama .... 268 

From a photograph by Marine, Panama. 

City of Panama from Ancon Hill 271 



PANAMA PAST AND 
PRESENT 



\ . 



PANAMA PAST AND 
PRESENT 

CHAPTER I 

GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 

A HUNDRED thousand years ago, when the Gulf of 
Mexico extended up the Mississippi Valley to 
the mouth of the Ohio, and the ice-sheet covered New 
York, there was no need of digging a Panama Canal, for 
there was no Isthmus of Panama. Instead, a broad 
strait separated South and Central America, and con- 
nected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This was the 
strait that the early European navigators were to hunt 
for in vain, for long before their time it had been filled 
up, mainly by the lava and ashes poured into it by the 
volcanoes on its banks. 

But though the formation of the Isthmus is for the 
most part volcanic, it has very few volcanoes of its own, 
and all of these have been extinct for untold centuries. 
The so-called volcano in the Gaillard Cut, about which so 
much was once said in the American newspapers, was 
nothing but a small mass of rock that had become heated 
in a curious and interesting way. The intense heat of 
the sun — thermometers have registered a hundred and 
twenty degrees in certain parts of the Cut at noon — 
caused the spontaneous combustion of a deposit of sul- 

3 



4 Panama Past and Present 

phur and iron pyrites or ''fool's gold." The smolder- 
ing sulphur heated a small pocket of soft coal, which 
in turn produced heat enough to crack holes in the rock, 
out of which came blue sulphur smoke and steam from 
rain water that had dropped on this natural stove. Ex- 
cept that care had to be taken in planting charges of 
dynamite in drill-holes near by, this toy volcano had no 
effect whatever on the canal work, and was presently dug 
up by a steam-shovel, and carried away on flat-cars. 

Volcanic eruptions are unknown on the Isthmus of 
Panama, and earthquakes are very rare. The great 
earthquake that devastated the neighboring republic of 
Costa Rica in 19 lo, barely rattled the windows in Pan- 
ama. The last shock of any severity was felt there in 
1882, when considerable damage was done to the cathe- 
dral, and to the Panama Railroad, and the inhabitants 
were very badly frightened. But for more than two 
hundred years there has been no earthquake strong 
enough to bring down the famous "flat arch" in the 
church of San Domingo, in the city of Panama. This 
arch, which was built at the end of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, has a span of over forty feet and a rise of barely 
two, and all the engineers that have seen it agree that 
only a little shaking would be needed to make it fall. 

Geographically, Panama is the connecting link between 
South and Central America. Politically, it lies between 
the republic of Costa Rica and the United States of 
Colombia, of which it was once a part. It is a much 
larger country than most people realize, having a length 
of four hundred and twenty-five miles, and a width of 
from thirty-one to one hundred and eighteen miles, with 



Geographical Introduction 5 

an area of about thirty-three thousand, five hundred 
square miles, which is very nearly the size of Jthe State of 
Maine, x^t the place where the canal is being built, the 
Isthmus is about forty miles wide, but though the actual 
distance from ocean to ocean is less in other places, the 
only break in the central range of mountains, the Cordil- 
leras del Bando, that runs from one end of the country to 
the other, occurs at this point. At the narrowest part of 
the Isthmus, near the South American end, the hills are 
from one to two thousand feet high, while near the 
Central American end there are not a few peaks of from 
six to seven thousand feet. At the summit of the old 
pass at Culebra, before the engineers began to cut it 
down, the continental divide was only two hundred and 
ninety feet above sea-level. 

On either side of the Cordilleras, broad stretches of 
jungle or open prairie slope down to the sea, the former 
predominating on the Atlantic side, the latter on the 
Pacific. Numerous streams flow into the two oceans. 
The largest of these is the Tuyra, which, with its trib- 
utary, the Chucunaque, empties into the Gulf of San 
Miguel, near the spot where Balboa waded into the 
Pacific (see page 61). The second largest and the 
best known of the rivers of Panama is the famous 
Chagres, whose mouth is only six miles from the Atlantic 
entrance of the canal. Like the Tuyra and the Chepo 
on the Pacific side, the Chagres is navigable for large 
canoes and small launches for many miles, particularly 
in the rainy season. River communication is very im- 
portant in a heavily wooded country where roads are 
scarce and bad, as they were in the United States before 



6 Panama Past and Present 

the Revolution, and are still on the Isthmus to-day. 
Though most of the smaller streams are little more than 
creeks, they produce a great volume of water-power 
which may some day be utilized. 

There are no lakes of any size, but there are several 
lagoons or natural harbors, almost completely land- 
locked. Chiriqui Lagoon, on the Atlantic near the Costa 
Rica line, has long been used as a coaling station by the 
United States Navy. The deep Gulf of Panama, on the 
Pacific, bends the greater part of the Isthmus into a semi- 
circle. 

Instead of running north and south, as you would 
naturally suppose, the Isthmus runs almost due east and 
west. That is because South America lies much farther 
to the east than most of us realize ; so much so, that if an 
airship were to fly far enough in a bee line from New 
York to the south, it would find itself over the Pacific, 
off the coast of Peru. At Panama, the Pacific, instead 
of being west of the Atlantic, is southeast of it. That 
is why the Spaniards, coming overland to this new ocean 
from the one they had left on the north, called it the 
" South Sea." A glance at the map on page 4 will make 
this plain. It sorely puzzles the visitor to the Isthmus 
to find the points of the compass apparently so badly 
twisted, particularly when he sees the sun rise out of the 
Pacific and set in the Atlantic. 

Though the two oceans are so near together at this 
point, there is a great difference in the rise and fall of 
their tides. The harbor of the city of Panama, on the 
Pacific side, where there is twenty feet of water at high 
tide, is nothing but a mud-flat at low tide, and the towns- 



. i 



Geographical Introduction 



people walk out among the stranded boats, and hold a 
market there (see page 213). The tide comes rushing 
in, when it rises, in a great wave or bore, something 
like that in the Bay of Fundy, with a heavy roar that 
can be heard far inland on a still night. But at Colon, 
on the Atlantic, the rise and fall of the tide is less than 
two feet. This curious fact, that the tides rise and fall 
ten times as far on one side of the Isthmus as on the 
other, is doubtless what has caused the wide-spread be- 
lief that at Panama one ocean is higher than the other. 
People who say that, forget that the waters of the At- 
lantic and Pacific meet 
at Cape Horn, and that 
sea-level is sea-level the 
world over. 

Panama is about eight 
hundred miles from the 
equator, in the same lat- 
itude as Mindanao in the 
Philippines. Its climate 
is thoroughly tropical. 
Gilbert, the only poet 
the Isthmus has ever 
produced, summed it up 
neatly in the first stanza 
of one of his best-known poems, 
Cocoanut Tree ": 




MANGOES. 



The Land of the 



Away down South in the Tropic Zone;- 

North latitude nearly nine, 

When the eight month's pour is past and o'er, 

The sun four months doth shine; 

Where it's eighty-six the year around, 



10 Panama Past and Present 

And people rarely agree; 

Where the plantain grows and the hot wind blows, 

Lies the Land of the Cocoanut Tree. 

" Eighty-six the year around " may seem an under- 
estimate but, as a matter of fact, the mercury stays very 
close to that point from year's end to year's end, seldom 
rising above ninety. (The temperature of a hundred 
and twenty, spoken of on page 3, was only found in the 
deepest parts of the Gaillard Cut at noon.) At night it 
is always cool enough to necessitate a light covering, and 
never so hot that one cannot sleep, as it too often is in a 
Northern summer. It is always summer in Panama, and 
no hotter in August than in December. Snow-storms 
and cold weather are, of course, unknown, though three 
times since the Americans established a weather bureau 
on the Isthmus it has recorded brief local showers of 
hail. 

Instead of four seasons, there are two : the rainy and 
the dry. From April to the end of November it rains 
very frequently, not every day, as is sometimes declared, 
but often enough and hard enough to fill, in those nine 
months, a tank from twelve to fifteen feet deep. With 
so much rain, and an ocean on either hand, the dampness 
and humidity are very great. Mold gathers on belts and 
shoes ; guns and razors become rusty unless coated with 
oil; books must not be left outside air-tight glass cases 
or they will fall to pieces; and every sunshiny day the 
clothes closets are emptied and the garments hung out 
to air. 

At that time of year it is easy to realize why houses on 
the Isthmus are built up in the air on concrete legs ; and 



Geographical Introduction 13 

the morning paper announces that the Chagres River has 
risen forty feet in two days and is still rising. The rain- 
fall is much heavier on the Atlantic side than the Pacific. 
They have a saying at Colon that there are two seasons 
on the Isthmus, the wet and the rainy; and the people of 
that town used to boast that it rained there every day 
in the year. But their local pride had a sad fall at the 
end of the record dry season of 19 12. At Colon, as well 
as elsewhere, it had not rained for months, wide cracks 
had opened in the hard, dry ground, and the whole coun- 
try-side was as brown and ragged as an old cigar. When 
at last '' the rains broke " at Ancon, over on the Pacific 
side, in a magnificent cloudburst — six solid inches of 
water in three hours — they were still carrying drink- 
ing-water to Colon in barges, and had to borrow Ancon's 
new motor fire-engine to pump it through the mains. 

When the rains have come, it is a wonderful sight to 
see how quickly the old, half-dead vegetation disappears, 
and the new green stufT comes rushing up. Though the 
soil is not rich, the heat and moisture cause plants to 
grow with incredible speed and rankness. Fence-posts 
sprout and become young trees. The stone-ballasted 
roadbed of the Panama Railroad has to be sprayed twice 
a month with crude oil to keep down the weeds. On 
either side of the track for the greater part of the way 
across the Isthmus stretches unbroken jungle, rising like 
a wall at the edge of the cuttings, or lying like a great, 
green sea below the embankments. It is a thoroughly 
satisfactory jungle, every bit as good as the pictures in 
the school geographies. High above the rest tower the 
tall ceiba trees, great soft woods larger than the largest 



14 Panama Past and Present 

oak. Besides these and the native cedars, there are 
mahogany, hgnum-vitge, coco-bolo, and other hardwoods. 
Some of these are exported for himber, others the natives 
hollow out into canoes, some of which are of incredible 
size. I have seen a dugout, made from one gigantic tree 
trunk, so large that it was decked over and rigged as a 
two-masted schooner. 

Under the trees, the ground is clogged with dense 
masses of tangled undergrowth, bound together with 
thorny creepers, and the rope-like tendrils of the liana 
vine. Worst of all to travel through are the mangrove 




MAN O' WARSMAN. 

swamps near the sea, for the branches of these bushes 
bend down to the ground and take root, so that it is 
like trying to walk through a wilderness of croquet 
wickets. Both here and in the jungle, a path must be 
cut with the machete, a straight, broad-bladed knife be- 
tween three and four feet long, that is the great tool and 
weapon of tropical America. A skilled machatero, or 
wielder of the machete, can cut a trail through the jungle 
as fast as he cares to walk down it. 

The great tree of Panama is the palm. There are 



Geographical Introduction 17 

said to be one hundred different species on the Isthmus. 
Most beautiful of all is the stately royal palm, brought 
by the French from Cuba to fill the parks and line the 
avenues. More useful is the native cocoanut palm, that 
groves everywhere, both in and out of cultivation. Sev- 
eral million cocoanuts are exported from the Isthmus 
every year. The brown, fuzzy shell of the cocoanut, as 
we know it in the grocery store at home, is only the in- 
nermost husk. As it grows on the tree, the cocoanut is 
as big as a football, and as smooth and green as an olive. 
Cut through the thick husk of a green cocoanut with a 
machete, and you have a pint or more of a thin, milky 
liquid that is one of the best thirst-quenchers in the 
world. When the nut is ripe the husk falls off and the 
milk solidifies into hard, white meat. When this is cut 
up into small pieces and covered with a little warm water, 
a thick, rich cream will rise, which cannot be distin- 
guished from the finest cow's cream. Ice cream and cus- 
tards can be made from this cream, and they will not 
have the slightest flavor of cocoanut. If, however, this 
cocoanut cream is churned, it will turn into cocoanut but- 
ter, which is good for sunburn, but not for the table. 
The nuts of the vegetable ivory palm are shipped to the 
United States to be cut up into imitation ivory collar- 
buttons^^" 

A native Panamanian will take his machete, cut down 
and shred a number of palm-branches, and with them 
thatch the roof of his mud-floored hut, which is built 
of bamboos bound together with natural cords of liana. 
Then with the same useful instrument he will scratch 
the ground and plant a few bananas, plantains — big 



l8 Panama Past and Present 

coarse bananas that are eaten fried — and yams — a 
sort of sweet potato — and they will take care of them- 
selves until he is ready to harvest the crop. He can burn 
enough charcoal to cook his dinner, and gather and sell 
enough cocoanuts to buy the few yards of cloth needed 
to clothe himself and his family, and spend the rest on 
hound dogs, fighting-cocks, and lottery tickets. He can 
grow his own tobacco, and distill his own sugar-cane rum. 
Now that the Americans have put an end to the revolu- 
tions, the poor man on the Isthmus has not a care in the 
world, and is probably the laziest and happiest person on 
earth. 

Besides bananas — which, by the way, grow the other 
way up from the way they hang by the door of the 
grocery — many different kinds of fruit are found in 
Panama. Mangoes and alligator-pears are great favor- 
ites with American visitors. On the Island of Taboga, 
in the Bay of Panama, grow some of the best pineapples 
in the world; not the little woody things we know in the 
North, but luscious big lumps of sugary pulp, soft 
enough to eat with a spoon. You have never tasted a 
pineapple until you have eaten a " Taboga pine." 

Flowers are as abundant as fruit. There are whole 
trees full of gorgeous blossoms at certain seasons. 
Roses bloom during the greater part of the year and 
rare and valuable orchids abound in the jungle. If the 
Republic of Panama ever adopts a national flower, it 
should be that strange and beautiful orchid found only 
on the Isthmus, that the Spaniards called " El Espiritu 
Santo," the flower of the Holy Ghost. When it blooms, 
which it does only every other year, the petals fold 



Geographical Introduction 19 




THE " HOLY GHOST ORCHID." 



back, revealing the perfectly formed figure of a tiny 
dove. 

It is true that the flowers on the Isthmus have no per- 
fume, but it does not follow, as is so frequently declared, 



20 Panama Past and Present . 

that the birds of Panama have no song. I have often 
heard them in the mating season, at the beginning of 
the rains, chirping and twittering as gaily as any birds 
in the Northern v^oods. Most conspicuous of all, among 
the feathered folk of the Isthmus, are the great black 
buzzards and " men-o' v^arsmen," so named because they 
v^heel about over the city in large flocks, manoeuver- 
ing v^ith the precision of a squadron of battleships. 
Formerly, these birds were the only scavengers, all ref- 
use being thrown out into the street for them to eat. 
They will soar and circle for many minutes with hardly 
a beat of their broad wings. When the first aeroplane 
(a small Moissant monoplane), came to Panama and 
flew among a flock of buzzards, it was difficult fpr a man 
on the ground to tell the machine from the birds. Other 
large fliers are the pelicans, while tall, dignified blue 
herons and white cranes walk mincingly through the 
swamps. Parrots of all sizes abound, from big gaudy 
macaws, with beaks Hke tinsmiths' shears, to dainty lit- 
tle green parrakeets, that the engineers call " working- 
models of parrots." Tiniest and loveliest of all are the 
bright-colored humming-birds. 

There are not many large mammals native to the 
Isthmus, and most of these have been hunted until they 
are now hard to find. The last time that a " lion," as 
the natives call the jaguar — a black or dark-brown 
member of the cat tribe, as big as a St. Bernard dog — 
was seen in the city of Panama, it was brought there 
in a cage and advertised to appear in a ferocious " bull 
and lion fight," at the bull-ring. When the cage door 
was opened in the ring, the jaguar jumped over the ten- 



Geographical Introduction 21 

foot barricade into the audience, bounded up the nearest 
aisle to the top of the grandstand, leaped down, and was 
last seen heading for the jungle. No one was hurt, for 
everybody gave him plenty of room. Another much- 
advertised beast that is seldom seen is the tapir, a fat 
black grass-eater, that looks like a miniature elephant 
with a very short trunk. Deer are still fairly abundant, 
pretty little things, not much bigger than a North Ameri- 
can jack-rabbit. Centuries ago there were large num- 
bers of warrees, or wild hogs, and of long-tailed, 
black-and-white monkeys, " the ugliest I ever saw," 
wrote Captain Dampier, the bucaneer naturalist. But 
to shoot either of these to-day, a hunter would have to 
go deep into the jungle. Per- 
haps the most curious-lookingf 
animal on the Isthmus is the 
armadillo, ^' the little armored 
one," the Spaniards called 
him, because of the heavy armadillo. 

rings of natural plate-mail 

that protect him against the teeth and claws of his ene- 
mies, as do the quills of the Northern porcupine. 

Reptiles are well represented on the Isthmus, though 
snakes are very much scarcer in the Canal Zone than 
one would naturally suppose. Only a few small boa-con- 
strictors — eight feet long or so — were killed during 
the building of the Canal, and there is no case of a lab- 
orer having been fatally bitten by a poisonous snake, 
although both the coral-snake and the fer-dc-lance are 
said to be found in Panama. Old stone ruins, that in 
the North would be swarming with blacksnakes and ad- 




22 



Panama Past and Present 



ders, seem here to be entirely given over to the lizards. 

Lizards are everyw^here, and of all sizes, from three 

inches long to five or six 
feet. These big fellows 
are called iguanas, and 
look remarkably like 
dragons out of a fairy- 
book, except that they 
have no wings and do not 
breathe fire and smoke. 
They are quite harmless, 
and eagerly hunted by the 
natives, because their 
flesh, when well stewed, 
tastes like chicken. One 
of the old chroniclers 
'guanas, which make good 




IGUANA. 



speaks of these lizards as 
broth." 

Far more formid- 
able than the harm- 
less lizards are the 
great man-eating 

crocodiles that swarm 
in the rivers of Pan- 
ama. They are not 
alligators, as is usu- 
ally and incorrectly 
stated, for the alli- 
gator is a smaller, 
broader-muzzled beast, that does not attack men. The 
American crocodile, usually confused with the alligator, 




CROCODILE. 



Geographical Introduction 25 

is larger and much more ferocious, and has a longer and 
sharper head. Many a man who has been upset in a 
canoe on the Chagres, or who has walked too near what 
looked like a rotting log stranded on the bank, has been 
caught and eaten by a crocodile. Parties of Americans 
are often organized to hunt and kill these dangerous rep- 
tiles. 

Man-eating sharks are found in the waters on either 
side of the Isthmus, as well as an abundance of Spanish 
mackerel, and other food fish. Indeed, the name " Pan- 
ama " means, in the old Indian tongue, " a place 
abounding in fish." There is not much chance that the 
different breeds of the two oceans will have a chance to 
mingle by swimming through the canal, unless they are 
able to swim uphill through locks and sluices, and 
through a fresh-water lake. (See page 230.) 

Though men and other animals are sluggish and lazy 
in the tropics, it is there that insects show the greatest 
vitality and activity. The big black ants go marching 
about at night in small armies, and negroes are hired to 
follow them till they find their nests, which they then 
pour full of an explosive liquid and blow up. Well- 
defined ant trails, an inch or so w^ide, run through the 
jungle, and even at noon they are crowded with hurry- 
ing passengers, every fourth or fifth ant carrying a bit 
of green leaf by way of a parasol. A corner of a cinder 
tennis court that was built for the officers of the battalion 
of marines at Camp Elliott blocked one of these ant 
paths, and the ants kept cutting it down to the former 
level, no matter how often the soldiers filled it up. Lit- 
tle red ants swarm in all the houses, however well they 



26 Panama Past and Present 

are kept. Sugar, candy, and all other sweet things are 
only safe on top of inverted tumblers standing in bowls 
of water, for nothing short of a moat will keep out the 
ants. But at the same time, this stagnant water may be 
serving as a breeding-place for mosquitoes. There used 
to be over forty different kinds of mosquitos on the 
Isthmus, but nowadays they are very rare. 

Another insect pest, however, that has not been abated 
is the famous '' red bug," a tiny tick, smaller than the 
head of a pin, but big enough to make plenty of trouble. 
The red bugs live in the grass, and burrow under the 
skin of human beings and animals and breed there until 
they are dug out with the point of a knife. Other 
species of ticks attack horses, cattle and fowls, and are 
a great pest to farmers in that country. Compared to 
them the more picturesque and widely feared scorpions 
and tarantulas do almost no harm. Both the scorpion, 
who looks like a small lobster with his tail bent up over 
his head and a sting at the end of it, and the tarantula, a 
huge spider covered with stiff black hair, are hideously 
ugly, and their bite or sting is intensely painful. But it 
is not fatal, as is commonly and erroneously supposed, 
and for every man that is hurt by a scorpion or taran- 
tula, hundreds of dollars' worth of damage is done by 
.ticks and red bugs.,, 

/"" Before the white men came, there was a large native 
population on the Isthmus. Some of the Spanish 
chroniclers place the number of Indians as high as two 
millions ; almost certainly there were more of them than 
the three hundred and fifty thousand persons of all races 
(see page 244), that inhabit that country to-day. The 



Geographical Introduction 



27 



life of the early Indian was not unlike that of the poorer 
Panamanian of the present. He wore less clothing and 
his women made it of cocoanut fiber instead of imported 
cotton cloth; instead of a steel machete he used a sort 
of hardwood sword called a macana,^ and he hunted and 
fought with bow and spear instead of firearms. But the 




SAN BLAS INDIANS IN VARIOUS COSTUMES. 

bohio or thatched hut, the cayuca or dug-out canoe, the 
rude farming and the fishing, have scarcely changed at 
all. The Isthmian Indians are very skilful boatmen and 
fishermen. Their canoes are often seen in Colon harbor, 
where they come to sell their catch. These Indians be- 
long to the Tule or San Bias tribe, that occupy and rule 
the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, from about forty miles 
east of Colon to South America. The Pacific side of 
this part of Panama is held by another tribe of Indians, 

1 An Indian chief, touching the keen blade of Balboa's sword, said, 
"Who can resist this macana, that can cut a man in half at one 
blow?" 



28 



Panama Past and Present 



the Chucunaques. Both pride themselves on keeping 
their race pure, despise the mongrel, half-breed Pana- 
manians, and forbid white men to settle in their country. 
People who complain that the San Bias and the Chucu- 
naques are " treacherous," and " inhospitable " forget 
that they are the survivors of a race once hunted down 




SAN BLAS INDIAN SUUAWS. 
Sitting with American canal employees on a dug-out canoe in a San Bias coast 
town. White men are not allowed ashore after sundown. 

by the white men with fire and sword and bloodhounds 
for their gold. In appearance, the San Bias are short, 
stocky, little fellows, many of them looking remarkably 
like Japanese. 

The narrowest part of the Isthmus is in the San Bias 
country, and has long been a favorite among the many 
proposed routes for an interoceanic canal. To give any- 
thing like a complete list of the various canal routes 
would be to review most of the history of the discovery 



Geographical Introduction 31 

and exploration of America. From the Straits of 
Magellan to Hudson's Bay, the early navigators sought 
for an open passage between the two oceans. Later, 
whenever explorers or engineers found a place where the 
continent was narrow, or broken by large rivers, or lakes, 
proposals were made for an artificial waterway. From 
the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the 
nineteenth, the routes most favored were the five marked 
by letters on the map on page 33. 

A. The Darien or Atrato River route. The dis- 
tance between the headwaters of the Darien River, flow- 
ing into the Gulf of Uraba, and the source of the nearest 
small river running into the Pacific, is very short. 
Canoes could be easily carried from one stream to an- 
other. There is a story that a village priest, at the end 
of the eighteenth century, had his parishioners dig a 
ditch, so that loaded canoes could be floated across the 
divide, without a portage. Whether or not that is so, 
it would be impossible for even the smallest modern 
cargo-boat to steam up a mountain creek, through such 
a ditch, and down the rock-strewn rapids of the upper 
Atrato. The divide is too high and the supply of water 
too scanty at this point for the construction of a ship 
canal suited for twentieth-century commerce. 

B. The San Bias route. Here, where the distance 
from sea to sea is only about thirty miles, Balboa crossed 
to the Pacific in 15 13. Shortly afterwards, this country 
was abandoned to the Indians, except for a brief time in 
1788, when an attempt was made to establish a line of 
posts, and a Spanish oflicer succeeded in crossing to the 
Pacific, but was not allowed to return. Interest in this 



32 Panama Past and Present 

region was revived by the lying reports of two adven- 
turers, Cullen and Gisborne, who declared that they had 
easily crossed and recrossed the San Bias country, and 
found the summit-level of the divide only a hundred and 
fifty feet high. Induced by these falsehoods (Cullen 
had never been to the Isthmus, and Gisborne not more 
than six miles inland), a small expedition under Lieu- 
tenant Strain, U. S. N., started from Caledonia Bay, on 
the Atlantic side, to march to the Gulf of San Miguel 
on the Pacific, in January, 1854. After suffering fear- 
ful hardships and losing one-third of their number from 
starvation, Lieutenant Strain and the others succeeded 
in reaching their goal. They were followed, in 1870-1, 
by several strong and well-equipped naval expeditions, 
whose surveys proved that the summit-level is at least 
a thousand feet above the sea. It was then proposed to 
build a canal there by boring a great tunnel through the 
mountains; but the rapidly increasing size of ships has 
made this out of the question. 

C. The Panama or Chagres River route. There is 
no truth in the story that Columbus sailed up the Chagres 
River and so came within twelve miles of the Pacific; 
but the Spaniards soon found out that the easiest way 
across the Isthmus was to pole or paddle up this river, 
and then go by road to the Pacific. The first proposal 
for digging a Panama canal : a shallow ditch between 
the head of navigation on the Chagres and the South 
Sea, was made as early as 1529. The Emperor Charles 
V not only opposed this project, but even forbade its 
being brought forward again, under penalty of death; 
ostensibly because of the impiety of the idea of joining 



Geographical Introduction 



33 



two oceans that God had put asunder, but, really, be- 
cause such a canal would give the enemies of Spain too 
easy access to her Pacific colonies. The later history of 
the Chagres route occupies the greater part of this 
book. 




A Atrato River route. C Panama route. 

B San Bias route. D Nicaragua route. 

E Tehuantepec route. 

MAP OF FIVE CANAL ROUTES. 



D. The Nicaragua route. The broad surface of 
Lake Nicaragua, and the San Juan River, that flows out 
of it into the Atlantic, make this seem a most obvious 
place for an interoceanic canal. Though much dredging 
of channels and building of breakwaters would be needed 



34 Panama Past and Present 

to make a safe harbor at either end, and expensive locks 
and dams would have to be built before large steamers 
could navigate the river and the lake, the same disad- 
vantages had to be overcome at Panama. The greater 
length of a canal at Nicaragua, — the continent at this 
point is one hundred and fifty miles wide, — and the closer 
proximity of more or less active volcanoes, with the 
greater danger of eruptional earthquakes, would make it 
inferior to the canal at Panama. The continual revolu- 
tions and political disturbances of Nicaragua, which has 
been so badly governed that no foreign government or 
private company has been willing to risk the investment 
of the hundreds of million of dollars needed to build a 
canal there, finally turned the scale against that country. 
Nicaragua is probably the only other place, beside Pan- 
ama, where it would be physically possible to build a mod- 
ern ship canal across the American continent. 

E. The Tehuantepec route. Not long after the 
Spaniards, under Cortez, had conquered Mexico, they 
built a road across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which 
is the narrowest part of that country. Centuries ago, 
there was more than a little trade by this road, between 
Spain and Mexico and the Far East, as was proved 
by the discovery at Vera Cruz of two large bronze 
cannon bearing the stamp of the old Manila foundry. 
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is too wide and the sum- 
mit-level too high, to be pierced by a sea-level canal ; and 
the supply of water is too scanty for a canal with locks. 
When the French were trying to dig a canal at Panama, 
an American engineer, Captain Fads, proposed to build 
across Tehuantepec a " ship-railway " : a railroad with a 



Geographical Introduction 35 

very broad gage, on which huge flat-cars would carry 
the largest vessels of the time from ocean to ocean. 
Like the Darien ship-tunnel, the increasing size of ships 
made this ingenious project impossible. The present 




CROSS-SECTION OF PROPOSED SHIP TUNNEL, SAN BLAS ROUTE. 

Tehuantepec Railroad is a standard gage road, doing a 
thriving business in carrying transcontinental freight. 
This has been temporarily, if not permanently, reduced 
by the opening of the Panama Canal. 



CHAPTER II 

HOW COLUMBUS SOUGHT FOR THE STRAIT 

IF you go to Panama by ship from one of our Atlantic 
.ports, the first land you will see is Watling's Island, 
or San Salvador, where Columbus caught his first 
glimpse of the New World in 1492. We know that this 
is one of the Bahamas, but Columbus died in the belief 
that it was an island off the coast of Asia. For though 
he rightly supposed the world to be round so that by sail- 
ing long enough to the west you could reach the east, 
neither he nor any one else in Europe at the time real- 
ized how long a voyage that would be. And the last 
thing Columbus imagined was that he should find a whole 
New World. 

According to his calculations, Japan must lie just 
about where he found Cuba, and so Columbus told his 
crew, and made them all take oath that Cuba zvas Japan. 
Now, he reasoned, it could be only a little distance 
further to the rich cities and kingdoms of the Far East. 
Wonderful stories of their wealth and luxury had been 
brought back to Europe by Marco Polo, the Venetian, 
and other travelers, who had made the long difficult 
journey overland from Europe to India, or even China. 
And for countless centuries the silks and spices, the gold 
and jewels, of the East had been carried to the West 
over caravan-trails that were trodden deep before the 

36 



How Columbus Sought for the Strait 37 



first Pharaoh ruled in Egypt. Do you know why they 
have the same fairy stories and folk-lore in Ireland 
that they have in Japan? Because they passed from 
lip to lip, from camp-fire to camp-fire along this old 
trade-route, no one knows how many thousand years ago. 

But in the fifteenth century 
the Turks captured Constan- 
tinople and closed the overland 
road. This threw the whole 
world out of gear. The Por- 
tuguese were the first to look 
for a new way to India, by 
sailing round Africa. And in 
1487, the brave captain, Bar- 
tholomew Diaz, succeeded in 
rounding the " Cape of 
Storms," and came back with 
the news that he had entered 
the Indian Ocean, and that 
there was good hope of reach- 
ing India by that route. So 
the King of Portugal com- 
manded the " Cape of Storms " 
to be rechristened the " Cape 
of Good Hope," and so it is statue of columbus at 

'- MADRID, 

called to this day. 

Bartholomew Columbus was on this voyage and talked 
it over with his brother Christopher, who pointed out 
how much easier and shorter it would be to sail twenty- 
five hundred or perhaps three thousand miles straight 
across the Atlantic to Asia, than to make the long trip 




38 Panama Past and Present 

of more than twelve thousand miles round Africa. The 
idea was not new, but the king of Portugal would have 
none of it; and you know what a bitter, weary time 
Columbus had at the court of Spain. All these black 
memories must have seemed to fade like small clouds far 
astern, as he sailed back to Palos with the glad news that 
he had discovered the outposts of Asia, and that another 
voyage or two would surely open the direct passage to the 
East Indies. But more than four hundred and twenty 
years were to pass before that passage was to be opened. 

Columbus discovered more islands on his second voy- 
age, and on the third came to the mainland of South 
America, at the mouth of the Orinoco. So great a body 
of fresh water as here poured into the ocean could flow 
from no mere island but from a continent, '* a 'Terra 
Firma, of vast extent, of which until this day nothing has 
been known." 

This made one mainland, or '' firm land," as the Span- 
iards called it, from some idea that a continent must be 
made of solider stuff than an island; and north of it, 
Cuba must make another. For at this time no one had 
sailed round, and this island Cuba or " Japan " was sup- 
posed to be part of the mainland of Asia. Somewhere 
between these two bodies of land, thought Columbus, 
must be a strait through which flowed the waters of the 
Atlantic into the Indian Ocean, causing the strong cur- 
rent to the west that was felt as far north as Santo 
Domingo. Once through the strait, instead of tamely 
retracing his course, he would sail round the world, and 
home to Spain by way of the Cape of Good Hope. By 
this he hoped to eclipse the success of Vasco de Gama, 



How Columbus Sought for the Strait 41 

who had at last realized the " good hope " of reaching 
India by way of the Cape, and returned to Portugal, 
laden with glory and riches in 1499. 

It was now 1502, ten years after the discovery of 
America, when Columbus sailed on his fourth and last 
voyage. He had four ships, the Capitana, Santiago de 
Palos, Gallego^ and Biscaina. The largest of these 
was but of seventy tons burden, the smallest of fifty, and 
all were worn and old. The crews numbered a hundred 
and fifty men and boys, there were provisions for two 
years, and both cannon and trinkets for winning gold 
from the Indians. Bartholomew Columbus was captain 
of one of the caravels, with the title of Adelantado, and 
with his father on the flagship was Christopher Colum- 
bus's thirteen-year-old son, Ferdinand. When he grew 
up, Ferdinand Columbus wrote a biography of his father, 
containing the best account we have of this voyage. 

They sailed from Cadiz on the ninth of May, 1502, 
took on wood and water at the Canaries, and put in at 
Santo Domingo, to exchange one of the ships for an- 
other, " because it was a bad sailer, and, besides, could 
carry no sail, but the side would lie almost under water." 
But Ovando, the governor of the Spanish colony there, 
was an enemy of Columbus, and refused to let him have 
a new ship, or even to take refuge in the harbor from 
a threatening storm. Ovando himself was just setting 
forth for Spain, in a great fleet of his own, laden with 
much gold that had been cruelly wrung from the poor 
Indians, including one nugget so large that the Spaniards 
had used it for a table. Columbus warned Ovando that 
a storm was coming, and was laughed at for his pains. 



42 



Panama Past and Present 



But scarcely had the governor's fleet set sail, when down 
upon it swooped a terrible West Indian hurricane, and 
sent most of the ships to the bottom, big nugget and all. 
One ship, the poorest of the fleet, reached Spain, with 
some of Columbus's own goods on board. On one of 
the few vessels that struggled back to Santo Domingo 
was Rodrigo de Bastidas, of whom we shall hear more 
presently. 

Columbus's own little squadron weathered the storm, 
thanks to the admiral's seamanship, which to the Spanish 
sailors appeared " art magic." Steering once more in 
the direction of the supposed strait, they were carried by 
the currents to the south of Cuba. There they fell in 
near the Isle of Pines, with a great canoe "of eight feet 
beam, and as long as a Spanish galley." Its owner, a 
cacique of Yucatan, was 
on a trading voyage, 
with a cargo of copper 
hatchets and cups, cloaks 
and tunics of dyed cot- 
ton, daggers and wooden 
swords edged with ob- 
sidian glass, and, strang- 
est of all to the eyes of 
the Spaniards, a supply 

of cacao (chocolate) __ 

beans. Here was evi- caravel. 

dence of something far superior to the naked savagery of 
the islands. It began to look as if Columbus would have 
some use for the Arabic interpreters he had brought with 
him, together with letters to the Great Khan of Tartary. 




How Columbus Sought for the Strait 43 

And indeed, if the old Indian that the admiral took 
on board for a guide had piloted the Spaniards to his 
own country, they would have found there great cities 
and stone temples and hoards of gold to their hearts' 
content. But when they had come to Cape Honduras, 
where the shore of Central America runs east and west, 
they asked the old Indian which way the gold came from. 
He pointed to the east, away from his own country, and 
so Yucatan and Mexico were left to be conquered by 
Cortez in 1 5 17. 

; Fighting against head winds — once they made but 
sixty leagues in seventy days — the little fleet struggled on 
down the coast. The first Indians they met with had such 
large holes bored in their ears that the Spaniards called 
that region " the Coast of the Ear." Better weather 
came after rounding Cape Gracias a Dios, or " Thanks 
to God," and the Indians offered to trade with guanin^ 
a mixture of gold and copper. Pure gold, they said, 
was to be found further down the coast. So Columbus 
kept on, past what are now Nicaragua and Costa Rica, 
until he came to the great Chiriqui Lagoon. Here were 
plenty of gold ornaments, in the form of eagles, frogs, 
or other creatures, such as are dug up to-day from the 
ancient Indian graves in the Province of Chiriqui. 
Among them we often find little bells of pure gold, 
shaped exactly like our sleigh bells, but Columbus does 
not mention them. Ferdinand Columbus does speak 
of finding something a little further down the coast that 
seems even stranger : the ruins of a stone wall, a piece of 
which they brought away ** as a memorial of that antiq- 
uity." 



44 Panama Past and Present 

The strait was now reported to be near at hand, so the 
interpreters declared; just beyond a country called Ver- 
agua, rich in gold. Eagerly they sped on, passing Ver- 
agua with a fair wind that carried them by Limon Bay, 
where we are now digging the Atlantic entrance of the 
strait they sought/ 

The admiral put in at a land-locked,' natural harbor, 
so beautiful that he called it Porto Bello, by which name 
it has been known ever since. After a week's rest here 
he pushed on to a number of islands full of wild corn, 
which he called the Port of Provisions. Finally, on the 
twenty-fourth of November, he made his furthest har- 
bor, a forgotten little cove named El Retrete, or the 
Closet. 

Here the search for the strait ended. Another white 
man had been over the ground beyond this, Bastidas, who 
had escaped from the hurricane at Santo Domingo, 
and almost certainly met Columbus there. From the 
Orinoco to Cape Honduras no break had been found 
in the barrier between the two oceans. So they 
turned back, battered by storms and terrified by a great 
waterspout, which, says Ferdinand Columbus, they dis- 
solved by reciting the Gospel of St. John. In Veragua 
they tried gold-hunting, and attempted to found a colony, 
but the Indians, under a crafty cacique, rose against 
them. After hard fighting, and an Odyssey of mis- 
fortunes, the Spaniards were forced to flee. They left 
the hulk of the Gallego, behind them and the Bis- 
caina at Porto Bello. The two remaining caravels, 
bored through and through by the teredo worm, stag- 
1 See Appendix. 



How Columbus Sought for the Strait 47 

gered as far as the coast of Jamaica, to be beached there, 
side by side. Two rotting wrecks, and the barren title 
of " Duke of Veragua," by which his descendants are 
known to this day, were all that Christopher Columbus 
brought back from the Isthmus of Panama. 



CHAPTER III 

HOW THE SPANIARDS SETTLED IN Dx\RIEN 

COLUMBUS having reported that there was gold in 
Veragiia, the King of Spain decided to found a 
colony there, and another beyond the Gulf of Uraba, 
where Bastidas had found pearls and gold. Into this 
gulf flowed a river so great that it filled the bay with 
fresh water at low tide. This river, which is now called 
the Atrato, was then called the Darien, and it has given 
that name to all the South American end of the Isthmus. 

Christopher Columbus died, a broken-hearted old man, 
in 1506, but his brother Bartholomew, the Adelantado, 
was alive and anxious to colonize the " Dukedom " of 
Veragua. But Queen Isabella, their patron, was also 
dead, and the greedy King Ferdinand was jealous of 
their family, and wanted these new gold-fields for the 
crown. So he appointed a court favorite, Diego de 
Nicuesa, to be governor of all the land between Cape 
Gracias a Dios, and the Gulf of Uraba. This was made 
the province of Castilla del Oro, or Golden Castille. 

The poorer land east and south of the gulf was called 
Nueva Andalucia (New Andalusia) and given to Alonso 
de Ojeda, a bold explorer, the first to have followed 
Columbus to the New World. On that voyage, in 1499, 
Ojeda had had with him the Florentine merchant's clerk, 

48 



How the Spaniards Settled in Darien 49 



Americus Vespucius, who has given his name to the whole 
New World. 

Both the new governors were small men, well built and 
in the prime of life. Ojeda was a famous athlete, who 
had once, by way of showing his prowess before the 
Queen, gone out on a narrow piece of timber that pro- 
jected twenty feet from the 
top of the Giralda tower at 
Seville, " w^alked along it as 
fast as if it had been a brick 
floor, and at the end of the 
plank lifted one foot in the 
air, turned, and walked back 
as quickly. Then he went to 
the bottom of the tower, placed 
one foot against the wall, and 
threw an orange to the top, a 
height of two hundred and 
fifty feet." ^ He was a rough, 
reckless, bull-headed fighter. 
Nicuesa, on the contrary, was 
of noble descent and polished 
manners, a skilled musician 
and orator, and a great favor- 
ite at court. Both alike were lacking in the thing most 
essential in a leader, the power of managing men. 

Both expeditions sailed from Santo Domingo. Ojeda 

got away first, on the tenth of November, 1509, with two 

ships, two brigantines, three hundred men and twelve 

mares. Nicuesa, the wealthier of the two, had spent all 

1 Las Casas. 




AMERICUS VESPUCIUS. 

Born at Florence, Italy, in 
1452; entered commercial serv- 
ice in Spain; accompanied four 
expeditions to the New World, 
on the first of which, in 1497. 
he claimed to have reached the 
continent of America before the 
Cabots and Columbus; died at 
Seville in 15 12. 



50 Panama Past and Present 

his money and more in equipping a larger fleet, and just 
as he was getting into his boat, he was arrested for debt. 
After ten days' delay a friend advanced the money, and 
Nicuesa set sail with two large ships, a caravel, and two 
brigantines, carrying a force of six hundred and fifty 
men. 

Ojeda, in the meanvvhile, had reached the harbor 
where the present city of Cartagena was founded in 
1 53 1. In spite of the warning of his second in com- 
mand, old Juan de la Cosa, that the Indians hereabouts 
were hard fighters and used poisoned arrows, Ojeda 
landed with seventy men, and attacked one of their 
towns. The Indians fled, Ojeda allowed his men to 
scatter in pursuit, and the Indians, suddenly rallying, 
killed with their darts and poisoned arrows, every Span- 
iard of the party but Ojeda and one follower. Ojeda's 
great strength enabled him to break through, and his 
small size made it possible for him to hide well behind 
his shield. Indeed, when his other men found him, 
half dead with exhaustion but unwounded, there were 
the marks of three hundred arrows on it. 

Nicuesa's fleet came sailing by, and he gladly lent his 
aid, particularly to avenge the death of Juan de la Cosa, 
who was one of the ambushed party and had been an old 
and beloved pilot of Columbus. The two governors fell 
on the Indians at night with four hundred men, and 
slaughtered a great number. Then Nicuesa sailed away 
to Veragua, and Ojeda entered the Gulf of Uraba and 
founded a town on his side of it, calling it San Sebastian. 

But here there were only more poisoned arrows, and 
neither gold nor provisions. A ship load of food 



How the Spaniards Settled in Darien 51 

bought from a gang of pirates who had stolen it, kept 
the colony alive for a while. When this was gone, 
Ojeda sailed on the pirate craft to bring help from Santo 
Domingo. He left San Sebastian in charge of his lieu- 
tenant, 'Francisco Pizarro, of whom history had a great 
deal more to say. If Ojeda did not return at the end of 
fifty days, they were to take the two brigantines and go 
where they pleased. 

When the fifty days were up, Ojeda and such of the 
pirates as were yet alive w^ere struggling along, up to 
their armpits in mud, through mangrove swamps on the 
coast of Cuba, where they had been shipwrecked. When 
at last they were rescued by the Governor of Jamaica 
and brought to Santo Domingo (where the pirates were 
all hanged), Ojeda was a ruined and worn-out man. 
Like many another fighter of that brave, cruel age, he 
became a monk shortly before his death, " making," in 
the words of the historian Oviedo, " a more praiseworthy 
end than other captains in these parts have done." 

Pizarro and his men waited the fifty days and a little 
longer, for the two brigantines w^ould not hold them all. 
After enough had died of starvation and arrow-poison 
to make room for the rest, they sailed to Carthagena, 
losing one brigantine by the way. In the harbor they 
found reinforcements from Santo Domingo, commanded 
by a lawyer named Enciso, who held pfiice under Govern- 
or Ojeda. He had with him one hundred and fifty 
men, with horses, arms, powder and provisions. But 
the most important part of his cargo was a barrel with 
a man in it. 

This man was Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who had made 



5*2 Panama Past and Present 

a failure of farming on Santo Domingo, and since debt- 
ors were not allowed to leave the island, had had a 
friend smuggle him aboard in this fashion/ When the 
cask had been opened, early in the voyage, the indignant 
Enciso was for setting him ashore on a desert island, but 
was persuaded not to do so. Now the pedantic lawyer 
turned on Pizarro's starving wretches, accused them of 
desertion, and insisted on their going back with him to 
San Sebastian. On the way, they were all shipwrecked 
again, and when they arrived at their destination they 
found the fort and settlement utterly destroyed, the In- 
dians fiercer than ever, and no food. What was to be 
done ? 

Balboa showed the way. He had sailed this way be- 
fore, with Bastidas, and across the gulf they had found 
both food and gold, on the shores of the river Darien. 
Most important of all, the Indians there used no poisoned 
arrows. 

At once Enciso and Balboa, with a hundred men-at- 
arms, crossed to the western shore, where five hundred 
warriors were drawn up to meet them. Kneeling de- 
voutly on the beach, the Spaniards vowed that if victo- 
rious they would dedicate both the spoils and their first 
settlement to the shrine, much reverenced in Seville, of 
Santa Maria de la Antigua. Then, rising, they rushed 
like starving wolves on the Indians. There was no 
poison in their arrows, and those that were not cut down 
in the first charge fled at once. 

Provisions and gold were found in the Indian town, 
San Sebastian was abandoned, and Enciso founded the 

1 Oviedo says Balboa was concealed in the folds of a sail. 



How the Spaniards Settled in Darien ^^ 

town of Santa Maria de la Antigua de Darien. But it 
was another thing to rule the rough men that lived there. 
They had had enough of Enciso's ways, which were 
better suited for a law court than a frontier, and Balboa 




" NOMBRE DE DIOS "— STREET SCENE. 

showed them how to get rid of him. They were now on 
the western side of the gulf, in Nicuesa's territory, and 
no one claiming authority under Ojeda had any power 
there. Balboa was a real leader of men, Enciso was not. 
The lawyer was deposed and Nicuesa invited to come 
and rule them. 

But what had become of Nicuesa? His fleet had been 
wrecked on the shore of Veragua, and he and the other 
survivors had struggled down the coast, sometimes afloat, 
sometimes wading through the swamps, always suffering 
incredible hardships. At last they came to Porto Bello, 
where one who had sailed with the " old admiral," as 
the Spaniards of that time called Columbus, recognized 



56 Panama Past and Present 

the anchor of the Biscaina. But the Indians killed 
twenty of them, and the rest fled to another port further 
east. '' In God's name " (or, in Spanish, en nombre de 
Dios), cried the first man who stepped ashore, 'Met us 
stay here." And for that reason " Nombre de Dios " 
has been the name of that port ever since. 

Of the six hundred and fifty men who had left Santo 
Domingo with Nicuesa, only a hundred reached Nombre 
de Dios, thirty of these soon died, the rest were so weak 
with hunger they could scarcely lift their weapons, and 
there w-as not one left strong enough to act as sentinel. 
Imagine their joy when a caravel came from the east, 
bringing Nicuesa's lieutenant, Colmenares, with supplies. 
He found the once handsome and elegant Nicuesa " of 
all living men the most unfortunate, in a manner dried 
up with extreme hunger, fihhy and horrible to behold "; 
informed him of the new settlement at Antigua, and that 
he had been elected its governor. 

This sudden change of fortune was too much for the 
poor little courtier. Instead of showing any gratitude, 
he declared that these men of Ojeda's had no right to 
settle in his country and that he would take away all the 
gold they had collected there. This news got to Antigua 
before him, and he was met at the beach by an armed 
mob. Balboa tried his best to save him, but in vain. 
They thrust the unfortunate Nicuesa and the seventeen 
men still faithful to him into a wretched, leaky brigan- 
tine, and turned him adrift to perish. And perish he did, 
though whether by land or sea no man can say. 

So both the royal governors were gone, and Balboa 
the stowaway ruled in Darien. 



CHAPTER IV 

HOW NUNEZ DE BALBOA FOUND THE SOUTH SEA 

THE first thing Balboa did, after Niciiesa had been 
thrust forth to die, on March first, 151 1, was to 
get rid both of Enciso and the leaders of the mob. He 
did this by sending the lawyer back to Spain, and then 
advising the others to follow and see that he did them 
no harm at court. He knew perfectly well that Enciso 
would complain to the King, and that the only excuses 
acceptable would be plenty of gold. As long as they 
sent him his royal share of that, his majesty cared but 
little what his loyal subjects did to each other in the far- 
off Indies. So Balboa looked for gold. 

Luck favored him. As the rear-guard of Nicuesa's 
men were being brought from Nombre de Dios to Anti- 
gua they were met by two men, naked and painted like 
Indians, who addressed them in Spanish. They were 
sailors who had run away from one of Nicuesa's ships, 
a year and a half before, and had been kindly received 
by Careta, an Indian chief. One of them, Juan Alonso, 
had been made Careta's chief captain, and he basely 
offered to deliver to them with his own hands Careta, 
bound, and to betray his master's town to the Spaniards. 

Balboa accepted the traitor's offer, marched to the 
town, and was hospitably received by Careta. After a 
pretended departure, he returned, rushed the town at 

57 



58 Panama Past and Present 

night, devastated it, arid carried off Careta and his family 
to Antigua. ' This was the ordinary way for Christians 
to repay Indian hospitaHty, both then and for a very 
long time afterwards. But what follows shows that 
Balboa was both kinder and shrewder than the average 
Spanish conqueror, who would undoubtedly have put 
Careta to death, now that he had seized his gold. Bal- 
boa, on the contrary, made peace with the chief and 
married his daughter. They agreed that Careta's people 
should supply Antigua with food, and the Spaniards 
help them against their enemies. 

So, by matching tribe against tribe, Balboa conquered 
a great part of Darien. Comogre, the richest chief of 
all, received him peacefully, with a great present of gold. 
The Spaniards were weighing this out and squabbling 
over the division, when the chief's eldest son contemp- 
tuously threw the scales to the ground. If they cared for 
that sort of stuff, he exclaimed, they would find plenty 
of it to the south. There by a great sea on which they 
sailed in ships almost as large as those of the Spaniards 
were a people, who ate and drank out of vessels of gold. 
Thus the Spaniards heard for the first time of the Pacific 
and Peru. 

Comogre's son offered to guide the white men to this 
sea and to let them hang him if they did not find it. But 
Balboa had heard of a wonderful golden temple of 
Dabaiba, somewhere up the Atrato River, and went up 
there to find it. He got no- further than a country where 
the Indians lived in the tops of big trees, and dropped 
things on visitors. Having conquered this tribe, by cut- 
ting down the trees, and suppressed an attempted revolt 



How Balboa Found the South Sea 61 

of five chiefs, Balboa loaded a ship with all the gold he 
could get, and sent it to Spain, to win him favor with the 
King. Then, as he knew that Enciso and his other 
enemies at court would be very busy, he decided to over- 
whelm them with the great news of his discovery of a 
new ocean. 

So on the sixth of September, 15 13, he set out to cross 
the Isthmus. Comogre's son had warned him that a 
thousand men would be needed to fight their way through, 
but Balboa had faith in his hundred and ninety well- 
armed Spaniards. They had with them bloodhounds, 
even more dreaded than themselves by the Indians, a 
train of native porters, and guides that led them by the 
best and shortest way. After some easy fighting and 
hard marching, they reached a hill, from the top of 
which, the Indians said, " the other ocean " could be 
seen. Halting his men, Balboa ascended alone, and was 
the first European to see the Pacific. This was Sep- 
tember twenty-third, and it was six days later, on St. 
Michael's Day, when they reached the nearest part of the 
Pacific, which is still called, for that reason, the Gulf of 
San Miguel. 

Wading into the great unknown ocean, Balboa took 
eternal possession, in the name of the King of Spain, of 
all its waters, and every shore they touched. To-day, 
Spain does not own an inch of land on that ocean. No 
one can point out the hill from which Balboa first saw 
the Pacific, and the Isthmus of Darien is less known to 
white men than it was four hundred years ago. 

After a few of the local chiefs had been beaten in 
battle, and one, a wicked tyrant named Pacra, had been 



62 



Panama Past and Present 



torn to pieces by the Spanish dogs, the others hastened 
to make friends with Balboa. They brought him a great 
deal of gold, besides pearls from the islands in the Gulf 
of San Miguel, and promised to collect much more. 
Suffering slightly from a fever, but without having lost 




Cupyriglit, 1382, hy Harper & Brothers. 



BALBOA. 



one of his men, Balboa returned in triumph to Antigua, 
after an absence of a little less than four months. But 
it would have been far better for him if his great exploit 
had been accomplished only a few weeks sooner, so that 
his messenger could have reached Spain before the new 
g^overnor had sailed for Darien. For this new governor 



How Balboa Found the South Sea 63 

who was to succeed Balboa, was the man who is seldom 
spoken of by his full name, Don Pedro Arias de Avila. 
but usually by his fearful nickname of " Pedrarias the 
Cruel." 



CHAPTER V 

HOW PEDRARIAS THE CRUEL BUILT OLD PANAMA 

ENCISO'S complaints had decided the king to ap- 
point a new governor, who should call Balboa to 
account. As usual, he picked a court favorite, Pedro 
Arias de Avila, called for short, Pedrarias Davila. He 
had served bravely as a colonel of infantry, and as he 
was now seventy years old, the king thought he could 
be counted on to attend strictly to the royal business, 
without having time to become dangerously powerful. 
But Pedrarias lived long enough to do more evil than 
any other man who ever came to the New World, before 
or since. 

The news of Balboa's first successes brought in re- 
cruits, who were particularly attracted by the tale of a 
river so full of gold that the Indians strained it out with 
nets. Fully fifteen hundred crowded into the ships, in- 
stead of the twelve hundred sought for. Light wooden 
shields and quilted cotton jackets took the place of the 
steel armor that must have killed more men with sun- 
stroke than it saved from the Indians' arrows. A Span- 
ish historian of the time calls this expedition '' the best 
equipped company that ever left Spain." 

When the fleet reached Darien, the silk-clad messen- 
gers, sent on shore to seek Balboa, found him sitting 
in his underclothes and slippers, overseeing some Indians 

64 



How Pedrarias Built Old Panama 65 

who were thatching a house. Even greater was the con- 
trast when the new governor entered the town next day, 
with his wife, Dona Isabel, on one hand, and on the 
other a bishop in robes and miter, with friars chanting 
the Te • Deum, and a train of gaily dressed cavaliers 
smiling scornfully at the tattered, sunburned colonists. 

But not many weeks later, one of these same men in 
lace and satin staggered through the streets of Antigua, 
begging in vain for a morsel of food, and finally dropped 
dead in the sight of all. There was not enough food 
for such a multitude, and besides, the newcomers died 
by hundreds of the fevers. This is probably why 
Pedrarias did not at once put Balboa to death, under the 
pretext of what he had done to Nicuesa and Enciso. For 
although he was bitterly jealous of Balboa's success, 
Pedrarias realized that the other's men were seasoned 
veterans, and his own were sickly recruits. Besides, the 
bishop and some of the other officials befriended Balboa. 
So he was merely fined, imprisoned a few days, and then 
released. If he had been a wiser man, Balboa would 
have returned to Spain, where he was now a great hero, 
but instead, he stayed to watch Pedrarias at his work. 

And dreadful work it was. Balboa had killed like a 
soldier, but Pedrarias tortured like a fiend. He had been 
instructed to establish a line of posts between the two 
oceans, and sent his lieutenant, Juan de Ayora, to locate 
the first fort at a place on the Atlantic coast called Santa 
Cruz. A chief who spread a feast for him, thinking to 
welcome his old friend Balboa, was tortured until he 
gave up all his gold, and then burned alive because it 
was not enough. As for the other chiefs Ayora caught. 



66 Panama Past and Present 

" some he roasted alive, some were thrown living to the 
dogs, some were hanged, and for others were devised 
new forms of torture." After several months of this, 
Ayora sneaked back to Antigua, stole a ship, and sailed 
away with all the gold so infernally won. 

Another force crossed to the Pacific side and ravaged 
there, but were glad to fight their way back again, as all 
the tribes were rising. They were met by Indians wav- 
ing the bloody shirts of the garrison of Santa Cruz. 
The blockhouse there had been stormed, and molten 
gold poured down the Spaniards' throats, while the In- 
dians cried, " Eat the gold, Christians ! Take your fill 
of gold!" 

A hundred and eighty Spaniards, with three field- 
pieces, wandered into poisoned-arrow country, fell into 
an ambush, and were shot down to a man. An expedi- 




PIECES OF EIGHT. 

tlon was sent up the Atrato to find the Golden Temple of 
Dabaiba, but here too the Indians had the advantage. 
Being naked and good swimmers, they easily dived under 
and upset the canoes. Half the Spaniards were drowned, 
and Balboa, who was second in command, brought the 
rest back to Antigua. And though many other expedi- 
tions were later sent up the Atrato, none has ever reached 



How Pedrarias Built Old Panama 67 

Dabaiba, so the golden temple must be there to-day — 
if it ever was there at all. 

Pedrarias, filled with fury at these defeats, took the 
field himself, but soon came down with a fever. Finally 
his alcalde, Espinosa, hurled himself with a sufficiently 
large force on the exhausted tribes and, by the beginning 
of 1 5 17, established a Roman peace. 

In the meanwhile, Balboa had been sent a royal com- 
mission as Adelantado of the South Seas, and Viceroy 
of the Pacific side of the Isthmus, but the jealous Pedra- 
rias had held it up. Now. Fonseca, the bishop, patched 
up a truce between the two. Balboa agreed to put away 
his Indian wife, and became engaged to the daughter of 
Pedrarias. 

There was a place on the Atlantic shore, between 
Antigua and abandoned Santa Cruz, called by the Indians 
Ada, or " the Bones of Men," because two warlike chiefs 
of long ago had caused a great slaughter of their subjects 
there. Here Balboa cut down and shaped the timbers of 
four brigantines. These were carried by hundreds of 
Indians and a few negroes, over a rough trail to the head- 
w^aters of the Savannah River, down W'hich they were 
rafted to the Gulf of San Miguel. It was an incredible 
piece of labor for the time, and none could have accom- 
plished it but Nunez de Balboa. When they came to set 
up the vessels, half the wood was found to be worm- 
eaten, and high tides and floods swept away much of the 
rest. But he persevered, until at last four fully equipped 
brigantines floated at anchor on the South Sea. 

Then came word of a new governor sent from Spain 
to take the place of Pedrarias. Balboa confided to a 
4 



68 Panama Past and Present 

friend that it might be wise for him to sail at once for 
Peru, '' if this newcomer meant aught of ill to his lord 
Pedrarias." Now this false friend had been his rival 
for the love of the Indian girl, and revenged himself by 
denouncing Balboa to Pedrarias as a traitor. Fran- 
cisco Pizarro was at once sent to arrest him, and, after a 
mockery of a trial, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, Adelantado 
of the South Sea, and noblest of the conquistadores, 
died on the scaffold in the plaza of Ada. 

Fearing the wrath of the ' new governor, Pedrarias 
crossed the Isthmus, and in 1519, founded a city on the 
site of a little fishing village called Panama. This name 
signifies, in the Indian language, " a place abounding in 
fish," and one reason the Spaniards settled here was to 
escape the famines they had suffered at Antigua. Both 
that town and Ada were soon abandoned to the Indians, 
who even now forbid white men to stay overnight in 
that region under penalty of death, so well do they still 
remember the cruelties of Pedrarias. 

I wish I could add that vengeance overtook that wicked 
old man, but he lived to rule and do evil, both in Panama 
and in Nicaragua, until he was ninety years old. The 
new governor died suddenly, and several in authority 
that came after him, including one bishop of Panama, 
were poisoned by Pedrarias. As for the Indians he 
caused to be killed, the historian Oviedo declares them 
to have been more than two million. 

The only consolation we have is the knowledge that 
Pedrarias, who was even fonder of gold than of blood- 
shed, was at first a partner of Pizarro's, when the man 
who had arrested Balboa sailed on his ships to the con- 



How Pedrarias Built Old Panama 69 

quest of Peru ; but later, Pedrarias lost his courage, and 
sold his quarter-share in the adventure for a miserable 
thousand crowns. How it must have wrung the cruel 
old miser's heart to see the ship loads of silver and gold 
that came up from the mines of Peru, to be carried 
across the Isthmus on the way to Spain. For it was this 
treasure-trade with Peru that made the wealth and glory 
of Old Panama. 



CHAPTER VI 

HOW SIR FRANCIS DRAKE RAIDED THE ISTHMUS 

SIXTY years after Balboa's discovery of the Pacific, 
the first EngHshman to see that ocean looked at it 
from the top of a '' goodlie and great high tree," some- 
where in the jungle back of Old Panama. This man 
was Francis Drake, a bold sea-captain of Devon, who 
had come to the Isthmus to pay a debt he had long owed 
the Spaniards : a debt of revenge for treacherous wrong. 

Five years before, in 1568, an English fleet under Sir 
John Hawkins had entered the harbor of San Juan de 
Ulloa (now Vera Cruz), in Mexico, ready either to trade 
peacefully with the Spaniards, or, if the latter preferred, 
to fight. The Spaniards received them as friends, ex- 
changed hostages as evidence of good faith, waited un- 
til a very much larger Spanish fleet had come in, and 
then suddenly attacked the English with both ships and 
forts. After an all-day's fight, every English ship but 
two was captured, sunk, or ablaze; but the Minion of 
Hawkins, and Francis Drake's Judith fought their way 
out and carried the news to England. Queen Elizabeth 
could not go to war with Spain, then the mightiest power 
on earth, but she winked her royal eye at the private acts 
of her seamen. 

Drake first made two quiet voyages to the Isthmus, to 
learn how the Spaniards handled the treasure-trade from 

70 



How Drake Raided the Isthmus 71 

Pern, and how he conld best attack it. It is said that 
Drake even lived for a while in disgnise at Nombre de 
Dios, which had been resettled and made the Atlantic 
port in 1 5 19, the same year as the founding of Old 
Panama. A roughly paved way, called the Royal Road, 
had been built between the two cities by the forced labor 
of captive Indians, and over this in the dry season long 
trains of pack-mules carried the gold and silver that was 
brought up by sea from Peru to Panama, across the 
Isthmus to Nombre de Dios. During the nine months 
of the rainy season the route was over a better road from 
Panama to the little town of Venta Cruz, now called 
Cruces, at the head of navigation on the Chagres River, 
and down this river in flat-boats and canoes to the sea. 
Once a year a fleet of galleons came from Spain, bring- 
ing European goods for the colonists and carrying away 
the treasure that had been accumulating since the last 
trip in the King's treasure-house at Nombre de Dios. 
The English called this the '' Plate Fleet," from the Span- 
ish word plata, or silver. 

Nombre de Dios was a ragged little town mostly 
bamboo huts and board shacks, except for the King s 
treasure-house, which w^as " very strongly built of lime 
and stone." The place was so unhealthy that it was 
known as " The Grave of the Spaniard," and most of 
the citizens spent the rainy season at Panama or Cruces, 
and only returned to Nombre de Dios to do business 
when the plate-fleet was in. 

Drake learned all these things after two years' prowl- 
ing up and down the coast, so in 1572 he made a third 
voyage to the Isthmus to put this knowledge to practical 



72 Panama Past and Present 

effect. Sailing boldly into Nombre de Dios harbor, at 
three o'clock in the morning on the twenty-ninth of July, 
Drake tumbled ashore with seventy-three men and cap- 




'inlf^f-ff 





" NOMBRE DE DIOS "— STREET SCENE. 

tured the sea-battery before the Spaniards could fire a 
single one of its six brass guns. Dismounting these, the 
English marched into the plaza, with drums beating, 
trumpets sounding, and six " fire-pikes " or torches light- 
ing the way with a lurid glare. There was a volley of 
shot from the Spanish musketeers, an answering flight 
of English arrows, a rush, a brief, brisk hand-to-hand 
fight, and the defenders went flying through the land- 
ward gate and down the road to Panama. 

In the governor's house the English found a stack of 
solid silver bars, seventy feet long, ten wide, and twelve 



How Drake Raided the Isthmus 73 

high, worth more than five inillion dollars but too heavy 
to carry away. So they went to the King's treasure- 
house for the gold and jewels stored there. " I have 
brought you to the mouth of che treasury of the world! " 
cried Drake, and ordered them to break in the door. 
But an instant later, he fell fainting from loss of blood, 
for during the fight in the plaza he had received a great 
wound in the thigh, which he had kept concealed until 
then. And you can realize how much his men loved 
Francis Drake, when in spite of his commands they left 
the treasure to get their wounded captain back to the 
boats. The garrison and citi- 
zens were rallying, and more 
troops had just come from 
Panama, but all the English 
got safely off, except one of 
the trumpeters. 

For the next six months 
Drake raided impudently up 
and down the coast, even cap- 
turing a ship in the harbor of 
Cartagena, the capital city of 
the Spanish Main,^ and the 
Spaniards dared not attack ^^^^,„...-—-. 
Iiim. Then, when his wound /y>^HJ i^'^^^ • 
was healed, and the dry season -'^ — ^^ '^^ 

had come, he set out with eight- Bom in Devonshire, about 1540; 

died off Porto Bello, in 1596. 

een Jinglishmen and thirty 

Cimaroons from his secret camping-place on the Atlantic 
shore to cross the Isthmus. The Cimaroons were some 
1 See Appendix- 




74 Panama Past and Present 

of the many negroes who had been brought to the Isth- 
mus as slaves, to take the place of the almost extermi- 
nated Indians, but had escaped from their Spanish 
masters into the jungle. Here they intermarried with 
the Indians, built towns of their own, and defied the 
Spaniards. Bands of Cimaroons, armed with bows and 
spears, — firearms were above their understanding — 
roamed the forest or raided pack-trains on the Royal 
Road. And this was what they were now helping Drake 
to do, as for centuries afterwards, both Cimaroons and 
Indians helped every enemy of Spain that came their way. 

The galleons from Spain were at Nombre de Dios, 
waiting for the pack-trains to bring across the treasure 
from the other plate-fleet from Peru, that Drake saw 
riding at anchor in the harbor of Panama. He had not 
enough men to go near the city, but as soon as they had 
seen the Pacific from the " goodlie and great high tree " 
Drake and his comrade, John Oxenham, both took oath 
that they would some day sail an English ship on that 
sea. 

A Cimaroon, sent into the city as a spy, brought out 
the news that three pack-trains were to leave Panama 
that night, traveling by moonlight to escape the heat, 
and laden, one with provisions, one with silver, and one 
with gold and jewels. A carefully planned ambush was 
laid on either side of the Royal Road, not far from Venta 
Cruz, but a silly sailor, named Robert Pike, spoiled every- 
thing by jumping up to look at a Spaniard who came 
riding out from the town. This horseman warned the 
train-escort, who sent forward the mules loaded with 
provisions. When Drake captured these, he knew the 



How Drake Raided the Isthmus 75 

treasure-train had escaped him, so he charged into Venta 
Cruz to see what he could find there. But there was no 
treasure in the village, only some Spanish ladies who 
were dreadfully frightened, until Drake assured them 
that no woman or unarmed man had ever been harmed 
by him. 



\ 







NATIVES PREPARING RICE FOR DINNER — NOMBRE DE DIOS. 

When he had returned to the Atlantic side of the 
Isthmus, Drake joined forces with some English free- 
booters, and they laid anether ambush on the Royal 
Road, this time only a mile out of Nombre de Dios. At 
dawn, a string of a hundred and ninety mules came 
tinkling and pattering along from Panama, with an escort 
of forty-five Spanish soldiers. A volley dropped the 
lead-mules, the rest promptly lay down, and the escort 
broke and ran to Nombre de Dios, leaving Drake's men 
the richer by fifteen tons of gold and as much silver. 
The latter thev buried round about, in the holes of the 



76 



Panama Past and Present 



land-crabs, and it is said that the Spaniards were never 
able to find it, and that it must be there to-day. As for 
the gold, Drake divided it fairly, and sailed back to Eng- 
land v^ith his share. 

Two years later, in 1575, John Oxenham returned to 
the Isthmus, crossed it with the aid of the Cimaroons, 
built and launched a pinnace on the southern side, and 

was the first Englishman 
to sail the Pacific. How 
he raided the Pearl Islands 
and was captured and put 
to death by the Spaniards 
from Panama, you can 
read best in Kingsley's 
noble story of " Westward 
Ho!" 

It was left for Drake to 
enter this sea that Spain 
had claimed for her own, 
through the strait Magel- 
lan had found in 1520, 
and to be the next after 
him to sail round the 
world. How, with one lit- 
tle ship, the Golden Hind, 
Drake swept the west coast 
of South America, and 
took the great treasure-galleon Cacafuego a hundred and 
fifty leagues from Panama ; how with a fleet he took and 
burned the city of Santo Domingo (but spared the cathe- 
dral because it held the ashes of Christopher Columbus), 




SAN BLAS INDIAN SQUAWS IN 

NATIVE DRESS. 

Note the gold nose-rings. 



How Drake Raided the Isthmus 77 

and sacked Cartagena; how with Sir John Hawkins he 
wiped out the memory of San Juan de Ulloa in the great 
Armada fight ; how he won knighthood and " singed the 
King of Spain's beard," are all parts of another noble 
story .for which there is no room here. 

The dream of Drake's life was to capture the city of 
Panama. In 1595, he brought a fleet to the Isthmus with 
Sir John Hawkins, captured and burned Nombre de 
Dios, and landed seven hundred and fifty soldiers to 
march across to Panama. But the Spaniards had bar- 
ricaded the Royal Road too strongly, and, besides, a great 
deal of sickness broke out on the fleet. So the English 
gave it up, and set sail for Columbus's old port of Porto 
Bello, but before they reached this harbor their admiral 
was dead. 

They buried him a league from shore, and as the 
leaden coflin sank beneath the waves, the guns of the fleet 
roared a farewell broadside, and a fort that the Spaniards 
had built to defend their new town of Porto Bello was 
given to the flames. This was on the twenty-eighth of 
January, 1596. Some people declare that '' Francis 
Drake lies buried in Nombre Dios bay " ; but those who 
did the burying say Porto Bello. And Captain William 
Parker, who captured that town only six years later, — 
in spite of its fine new forts, — marks on his chart a 
spot not far outside the harbor as "the Place where my 
Shippes roade, being the rock where Sir Francis Drake 
his Coflin was throwne overboorde." 



CHAPTER VII 

HOW MORGAN THE BUCANEER SACKED OLD 
PANAMA 

THERE are three sundry places where this citie (Old 
Panama) may without difficulty be taken, and 
spoyled by the Pirates. . . . And forasmuch as the most 
part of these people (the citizens) are marchants, they 
will not fight, but onely keepe their owne persons in 
safetie, and save their goods ; as it hath bene sene here- 
tofore in other places of these Indies. . . . Therefore it 
behooveth your majestic to fortifie these places very 
strongly." / 

So wrote Baptista Antonio, an Italian surveyor who' 
had been sent by Philip II of Spain to report on his cities 
in the West Indies in 1587. Of the three ways he men- 
tioned by which pirates could come to attack Old Pan- 
ama, one was through the Darien country to the east, 
and nothing was done to prevent it. The second was 
by way of Nombre de Dios, but that town was already 
being abandoned for Porto Bello, healthier and strongly 
fortified with stone castles. The third route was up the 
Chagres, and the King did build a small wooden castle, 
called Fort San Lorenzo, to protect the mouth of the 
river. But nothing was done at Old Panama. 

Yet with a little strengthening here and there, it could 
have been made a formidable place to attack. The sea 

78 



How Morgan Sacked Old Panama 79 

protected it on the south with a broad belt of quicksands 
at low tide ; on the west lay a marshy creek crossed by 
a narrow stone arch ; and on the north or landward side 
was a swamp, drained by another stream ( also crossed by 
a stojie bridge, recently discovered) that flowed into 
the harbor on the east. The space so enclosed was four- 
teen hundred and twelve 
varas (yards) from east 
to west, by four hundred 
and eighty-seven from 
north to south, and the 
city had only seven streets 
running up from the sea, 
and four along the beach. 
There were three plazas, 
on the largest of which 
stood the Cabildo or city 
hall, court house, jail, 
hospital, and other pub-^^ 
lie buildin5:s, which were 

- , , , , GALLEON. 

of stone, and the cathe- 
dral, which at first was made of wood, like all the private 
houses. Scattered about the city were three small mon- 
asteries and a convent, and on a rocky knoll by the har- 
bor stood the barracks of the Genoese company that 
traded in negro slaves. 

These slaves were very numerous. In 1575, fifty-six 
years after the foundation of the city, there were only 
four hundred houses and five hundred Spanish citizens 
in the place, but the blacks and mulattoes numbered over 
three thousand. They drove the mules on the Royal 




8o Panama Past and Present 

Road, manned the flat-boats on the Chagres, cultivated 
the few fields and gardens; in short, did all the work 
while their masters made money in trade and speculation. 
• It was not so much the treasure-trade with Peru that 
brought wealth to the citizens of Old Panama, for that 
was a royal monopoly that profited only the king — and 
the officials that handled it. Neither was it the pearls 
from the Pearl Islands, nor the gold from the struggling 
placer-mines in Yeragua. For a short time there was a 
profitable trade with the Philippines, soon stopped by a 
foolish royal decree. But what really profited the Isth- 
mian merchants was the trade in smuggled goods. 

Foreigners were strictly forbidden to trade with the 
Spanish colonies, and when the yearly plate-fleet came 
to Porto Bello, it was supposed to bring only homemade 
goods. But Spain has never been a great manufacturing 
country, and the company which had the monopoly of 
that trade usually sent only one small ship load. So 
when each of the other vessels sent ashore her sails to 
make a great booth for the busy weeks of the " Galleon 
Fair," there were more things sold than ever saw Spain 
or paid duty to the king. Every once in a while, the 
Spanish government would make an attempt to stop this 
free-trading by savagely attacking the foreign traders- 
So they had stirred up Sir Francis Drake against them, 
and now they were to rouse the bucaneers. 

These were men of all nations, but principally English, 
French, and Dutch, who made a living hunting the wild 
cattle, descendants of stock introduced by the first Span- 
ish discoverers, in the West Indian islands. They cured 
or dried the beef over a bed of live coals, after a fashion 



How Morgan Sacked Old Panama 8l 

taught them by the Indians, and called by the French 
boiican, and from this they became known as the '' bou- 
caniers " or " bucaneers." When the Spaniards tried to 
drive them away by killing off the wild cattle, these fierce 
cowboys of the sea began to hunt the Spaniards. Pad- 
dling up astern of a becalmed galleon in their dug-out 
canoes, the bucaneers would put an ounce ball from one 
of their long, heavy muskets into every head that showed 
at a port-hole or over the rail ; then, wedging the rudder 
fast, they would swarm on board with knife and cutlass. 
Soon they were capturing Spanish ships of war and 
cities, and they helped the British government under 
Cromwell turn the island of Jamaica from a Spanish into 
an English colony. The city of Port Royal, in that 
island, became their headquarters, and it was from there 
that they followed Henry Morgan to Porto Bello and 
Old Panama. 

Henry Morgan was the son of a Welsh farmer. He 
ran away to sea as a boy, joined the bucaneers, and by 
his great skill both as a sailor and a fighter, became their 
leader. Like wSir Francis Drake's, his exploits are too 
many to be told here, but unlike Drake, who was of a 
noble and generous nature and fought like an honorable 
soldier, Harry Morgan was a greedy, bloodthirsty pirate. 
His men hated him, but they followed him, for he always 
led them to victory. 

Sailing quietly up to a spot near Porto Bello, one dark 
night in 1669, Morgan landed with four hundred and 
sixty bucaneers, and before the garrison could take 
alarm, the town and all the castles but one were in his 
hands. This last fort was defended valiantly, from 



82 



Panama Past and Present 



dawn till noon, when Morgan forced some captured 
priests and nuns to place scaling-ladders against the wall, 
knowing the Spaniards would not fire on them. So the 
bucaneers captured the fort and put all within it to the 




A BUCANEER. 



sword, the brave commander having refused to accept 
quarter. After plundering the city and torturing the in- 
habitants, Morgan sailed away ; but first he answered the 
governor of Panama, who sent a man under a flag of 
truce, to ask him with what sort of weapons his men had 



How Morgan Sacked Old Panama 83 

captured so strong a city. Morgan gave the messenger 
a pistol and a few small bullets, as a sample or '' slender 
pattern," with the word that he would himself come to 
Panama and take them back within a twelvemonth. 

Next year the advance forces of the bucaneers, four 
hundred strong, under Captain Bradley, landed near the 
mouth of the Chagres and attacked Fort San Lorenzo. 
Here double walls of palisades, filled in with earth, ran 
round the top of a steep hill. Outside was a ditch, inside 
were heavy cannon and a picked garrison of Spanish reg- 
ulars. They beat off the first assaults with great loss to 
the bucaneers, one of whom was shot through the body 
by an Indian bowman in the fort. Pulling out the arrow, 
the plucky pirate wrapped a bit of cotton round it, 
rammed it into his musket and fired it back. Set on fire 
by the powder, the burning arrow fell on a palm-thatched 
roof, and before the Spaniards could put it out, the 
powder-magazine had exploded and the castle was all 
ablaze. As the palisades burned, the earthworks crum- 
bled into the ditch, and the bucaneer marksmen easily 
picked off the soldiers from the darkness of the jungle. 
When Fort San Lorenzo was stormed next morning, not 
a single of^cer and only thirty soldiers, twenty of whom 
were badly wounded, were left alive out of a garrison 
of three hundred and fourteen men. No place was ever 
defended more gallantly. 

Morgan came in with his fleet and after placing garri- 
sons both here and at Porto Bello, he started up the 
Chagres River with a picked force of fourteen hundred 
men. Very foolishly, they took only enough provisions 
to last two days. The Spaniards retreated before them. 



84 



Panama Past and Present 



devastating the country, and for nine terrible days the 
bucaneers struggled on, eating their leather belts, grass, 
leaves, or anything that would fill their stomachs. Two 
hundred died of starvation or were shot by hostile In- 
dians, but the rest won 
through to the hill, called 
ever since the " Hill of the 
Bucaneers," from which they 
caught their first glimpse of 
Old Panama. 

The city had been steadily 
growing until 1640, when it 
contained seven hundred and 
fifty houses with eight thou- 
sand inhabitants, about a 
quarter of whom were white. 
Four years later, a great fire 
destroyed most of the town, 
including the cathedral, and 
if we make no allowance for 
this setback, the former rate 
of increase would give us, by 
about ten thousand inhabitants, and a 
Among these was a splen- 




ARMS OF THE OLD CITY OF 
PANAMA. 
Granted by royal decree, Sep- 
tember 15th, 1521. In 1581, the 
city was given the title of " Very 
noble and very loyal." 



the end of 1670, 

thousand houses of all sorts. 

did new stone cathedral, dedicated only five years before 

Morgan came. 

For the defense of the city, the governor, Don Juan 
Perez de Guzman, mustered a force of four hundred 
cavalry, and twenty-four infantry companies of one hun- 
dred men each. This must have called out virtually 
every able-bodied white man and free mulatto and negro 



How Morgan Sacked Old Panama 85 

in Old Panama, for they could not have armed the slaves 
without turning them into Cimaroons. The best of the 
regular troops had been lost at Fort San Lorenzo, and 
the bulk of de Guzman's force was raw militia, many 
of the infantry being armed with fowling-pieces or shot- 
guns. 

Opposed to them were twelve hundred veteran fight- 
ing-men, no longer weak with hunger, for the Spaniards 
stupidly let a herd of cattle stray in their enemies' path, 
and the bucaneers had a great feast and a good night's 
rest before the battle. An Indian guide led them away 
from the ambuscades and batteries placed on the Royal 
Road, forcing de Guzman to attack the English on the 
open plain before the city. The battle began at sunrise 
on the twenty -eighth of January, 1671. 

The Spanish cavalry charged impetuously, but the 
bucaneer marksmen coolly shot half the squadron out of 
their saddles at the first volley, and soon scattered the 
rest, though they rallied again and again. An attempt 
was made to drive a herd of two thousand wild bulls over 
the bucaneers, who easily stampeded them in every di- 
rection. Nothing was left but the huddled mass of 
Spanish foot soldiers, inferior both at long range and 
hand-to-hand fighting, but brave enough to stand their 
ground until six hundred of them were killed. Then 
they broke and fled into the city. 

De Guzman, after vainly trying to rally his defeated 
troops, blew up the powder-magazines, which started fires 
all over the city. To make it worse, many houses were 
set on fire by revengeful negro and Indian slaves. By 
the time Morgan's men had stormed the batteries that de- 



86 Panama Past and Present 

fended the bridges, a strong sea breeze was sweeping the 
flames through the town. Both the bucaneers and the 
citizens tried to stop the fire, blowing up some of 
the houses in its path and tearing down others, but by 
the next morning, Old Panama was a heap of ashes. 

Morgan camped in the ruins for a month, torturing 
prisoners and hunting for 'treasure. He found much 
less than he expected, for a galleon had escaped to sea 
with all that belonged to the church and the king. 
After plundering the islands and all the country round, 
and receiving ransom for their prisoners, the bucaneers 
returned to Fort San Lorenzo. Here that old villain 
Morgan got the treasure on board his own ship and sailed 
away, leaving his comrades in the lurch. With this 
doubly stolen money, he not only bought a pardon from 
King Charles H, but became Sir Henry Morgan, lieu- 
tenant-governor of Jamaica, and a most merciless catcher 
and hanger of bucaneers ! 

Among the men deserted by Morgan was Jan Esquem- 
eling, a Dutchman, who wrote a most entertaining book 
on " The Bucaneers of America." In it he declares 
that Old Panama contained two thousand richly fur- 
nished mansions, besides five thousand smaller houses. 
Now Esquemeling never entered the city until it was al- 
ready on fire, and to any one acquainted with the facts, 
this part of his narrative reads like a boasting pirate's 
yarn, smacking strongly of Sindbad the Sailor. Yet on 
the strength of it, modern historians have credited Old 
Panama with a population of from thirty to fifty thou- 
sand and luxury 

That far 
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind. 



How Morgan Sacked Old Panama 87 

But the Spanish chroniclers make no mention of any 
such amazing growth after the fire of 1644; and the re- 
cent excavations made on the site by the Panamanian 
government shov^ no ruins outside the quadrangle of 
fourteen hundred and twelve by four hundred and eighty- 
seven yards enclosed by the sea and the two creeks. 
Inside that space there is not room for seven thousand 
huts, let alone houses, after you allow for eleven streets, 
three plazas, and a sizable cathedral. To-day, the vine- 
clad shell of that cathedral's tower, the stone arches of 
two bridges, and a few bits of jungle-smothered wall, are 
all that mark the spot where stood the proud city of Old 
Panama. 




CHAPTER VIII 

HOW THE ENGLISH FAILED TO TAKE NEW PANAMA 

TWO years after the destruction of Old Panama, the 
city was rebuilt on a better site, six miles to the 
west. Here, on a rocky peninsula at the foot of Ancon 
Hill it received even better protection from shoals and 
coral reefs than at the former place, and was much 
nearer the islands of Naos and Taboga, that had always 
been the port for vessels of any size. These natural 
defenses were strengthened by stone walls so massive 
and well-armed with heavy cannon that they cost, even 
with slave labor, over eleven million dollars. " I am 
looking for those expensive walls of Panama," said the 
King of Spain, when asked why he stood gazing out of 
a palace window to the west. " They cost enough to be 
visible from here." 

But those costly walls were to earn their keep, for 
they alone kept the bucaneers from overrunning Pan- 
ama, and making it another Jamaica. Only seven years 
after Morgan left the Isthmus, the town of Porto Bello 
was plundered by a small gang of bucaneers, the garri- 
son not daring to come out of the forts. Other raiders 
had already gone through the Straits of Magellan, but 
the favorite route of these later bucaneers was through 
the Darien region, by the same pass used by Balboa. The 
Darien Indians, glad to ally themselves with any enemies 

88 



How the English Failed 91 

of their ancient foes, the Spaniards, guided across large 
parties both of EngHsh and French bucaneers, under 
many different captains, but all with the same purpose, of 
plundering the Spaniards in the South Seas. Between 
1680 and 1688, these daring raiders had wiped out every 
settlement and mining-camp on the Pacific shore of 
Darien, plundered every island, defeated two Spanish 
fleets in the Bay of Panama, and fought a drawn battle 
w4th a third, and were only kept out of the city by its 
strong walls. 

Among these later bucaneers were not a few well- 
educated men, like Captain Dampier, who carefully stud- 
ied the natural history of the Isthmus, and made some 
excellent maps. Lionel Wafer, surgeon on one of the 
ships, lived for months among the Darien Indians, learned 
their language, and wrote a long book about them when 
he returned to England. Several of the captains were 
discussing the idea of forming a colony among these 
friendly Indians, and inviting all old bucaneers to come 
and settle there. This project was stopped, and the alli- 
ance between the English and French bucaneers broken 
off by England's becoming the ally of Spain against 
France, after the Revolution of 1688. At the same time 
a pardon was offered to all bucaneers who ceased mak- 
ing private war on Spain, and those that persisted were 
thereafter to be treated as pirates. 

The idea of starting a colony in Darien, reopening the 
road between Ada and the Gulf of San Miguel, and estab- 
lishing a transisthmian trade between Europe and Asia, 
appealed to James Patterson, a shrewd Scotch financier, 
who had already founded the Bank of England. His 



92 Panama Past and Present 

scheme met with instant approval in Scotland, then a 
distinct kingdom, though under the same monarch as 
England. The royal approval having been given to an 
act of the Scottish Parliament, incorporating a company 
for the purpose of founding such a colony, the Scotch 
enthusiastically declared, 

King William did encourage us, against the English will ; 
His word is like a stately oak, will neither bend nor break, 
We '11 venture life and fortune both for Scotland and his sake.^ 

But there was very little of the " stately oak " about 
William Ill's behavior, when the powerful British East 
India Company complained that its monopoly of trade 
with the East might be injured. At once, the governors 
of Jamaica and all other English colonies were forbidden 
to help the Scotch colonists, a warship was sent to seize 
the land if possible, before they disembarked, and, heav- 
iest blow of all, the English subscribers were made to 
return their shares. So though the Scotch wxnt ahead 
by themselves, reached Darien before the English war- 
ship, and established their colony, they had not enough 
money to maintain it properly. 

The Indians were glad to welcome twelve hundred 
white men, come, as they supposed, to wage war on the 
Spaniards. A harbor near Balboa's old town of Ada 
was now named Caledonia Bay, and on it was built the 
town of New Edinburgh, guarded by Fort St. Andrew. 
A treaty of alliance was made with the Indians, who were 
eager to take the field, and great apprehension was felt 
at Panama and Porto Bello. 

1 " The Darien Song, by a Lady of Quality." 



How the English Failed 93 

But to the astonishment of every one else, the Scotch 
did nothing but sit still, until a quarter of them had died 
of starvation and fever. Then the rest took ship to 
New York, in June, 1699, eight months after the found- 
ing of the colony, and when reinforcements were already 
on the way. The second expedition only left a few men 
and sailed away, but the third brought thirteen hundred 
more. Ship loads of food came from several of the Eng- 
lish colonies in North America, in spite of the King's 
command, but there was no money in New Edinburgh 
to buy it. Neither was there enough sense among the 
wrangling ministers and whisky-soaked counselors to 
realize that if they did not attack the Spaniards while the 
Scotchmen were still healthy, the Spaniards would cer- 
tainly attack them after they were sick. Presently a 
small Spanish force marched against New Edinburgh, 
but were routed out of their palisaded camp by half their 
number of Scots under Captain Campbell. But when a 
strong fleet from Cartagena attacked the town there 
were very few healthy men left in it, and the colonists 
were glad to accept the generous terms ofTered and leave 
the country. So weak were most of them that the Span- 
iards had to help them hoist their sails. 

So ended the attempt to plant a colony in Darien. It 
failed for two reasons : the lack of a leader among the 
Scotch, and the short-sighted jealousy of the English. It 
was no love of Spain, who had ceased to be her ally, but 
selfish fear for her own trade, that set England's face 
against the struggling Scotch colony. Had it been kept 
alive only a few years longer, until the War of the Spanish 
Succession, New Edinburgh and its Indian allies would 



94 Panama Past and Present 

have made it easy for England to take not only Darien 
but the whole Isthmus of Panama. Later, England real- 
ized the truth of Patterson's statement that, " These 
doors of the seas, and the keys of the universe, would be 
capable of enabling their possessors to give laws to both 
oceans, and to become the arbitrators of the commercial 
world." 

When England had her next war with Spain, " The 
War of Jenkins's Ear," Admiral Edward Vernon, after 
whom Washington's home, Mt. Vernon, is named, was 
sent to attack Porto Bello. With six ships of the line he 
battered down its stone castles, captured the town, and 
sank some Spanish giiarda-costas or revenue-cutters, in- 
cluding the one whose captain had cut off the ear of Cap- 
tain Jenkins, an English trader, and so started the war. 
This was in 1739. Next year Vernon captured the pres- 
ent stone castle of San Lorenzo, that had replaced the 
wooden one destroyed by Morgan, and prepared to send 
a force across the Isthmus to attack New Panama, against 
which another fleet, under Admiral Anson, had been sent 
round the Horn. But Vernon's men began to die of 
fevers, and he feared to advance without cannon, which 
could not be taken either up the Chagres or along the 
Royal Road; so he attacked Cartagena instead, failed 
there, and went home. Hearing this, Anson sailed away 
to attack Manila, and Panama was saved. 

Only the shell of its former greatness was saved, how- 
ever, for all these wars had driven trade away from 
the Isthmus to the Straits of Magellan. Moreover, the 
Peruvian mines were nearly exhausted, and after the 
middle of the eighteenth century, the plate fleets sailed 



How the English Failed 97 

no more from Porto Bello. Both Spain and England 
turned their attention away from Panama to Nicaragua, 
and, in 1780, Horatio Nelson, then a post-captain, was 
sent to take that country for George III. But though 
he easily defeated the Spaniards, Nelson was driven away 
by yellow fever, that killed one hundred and ninety out 
of the two hundred men on his ship. 

So, for one reason or another, from the time when the 
Isthmus lay helpless under the feet of Morgan until the 
last of the Spanish viceroys drove a band of English 
filibusters out of the oft-captured town of Porto Bello, 
in 18 19, the English failed to take Panama from Spain. 
" These doors of the seas and keys of the universe " were 
not destined to be theirs. 



CHAPTER IX 

HOW THE AMERICANS BUILT THE PANAMA RAILROAD 

PANAMA was the last stronghold, as it had been the 
first colony, of Spain in the three Americas, but 
when the Isthmus somewhat languidly declared its inde- 
pendence in 1 82 1, the commander of the royal troops did 
not consider the former " Treasure-House of the World " 
worth the snap of a flint-lock. For since 1740, when 
trade had left it for the Cape Horn route, Panama had 
withered up into a place of almost no importance. Now 
that the old Spanish prohibition of foreign trade was 
removed, the Isthmus expected to share with the rest of 
Spanish America in a great commercial revival. 

But though foreign ships now came to the village at 
the mouth of the Chagres, for which Porto Bello was 
presently abandoned, the difficulty of getting their car- 
goes across the Isthmus was too great. Many schemes 
were advanced for building a horse-car line or digging a 
canal, but nothing ever came of them. Year after year, 
the torpid little community lay between its two oceans 
and " drowsed the long tides idle," till it woke to new life 
with the discovery of gold in California, and the coming 
of the Forty-niners. 

Thousands of Americans were poled and paddled up 
the Chagres in overcrowded dugouts to Cruces, and' rode 
over the old paved road, now no better than a worn-out 

98 



The Panama Railroad 



99 



trail, to Panama City. So rough was the road that the 
mules could scarcely scramble over it, and many pas- 
sengers preferred to be carried in chairs on the backs 
of negro or Indian porters. Four nights were usually 
spent , on the journey across the Isthmus, nights of 




From Harpei's Magazine, by special permission of the publisliers. 

SURVEYING FOR THE PANAMA RAILROAD IN 1850. 

crowded discomfort in native huts, where hammocks 
were rented for two dollars, and eggs cost twenty-five 
cents apiece. Panama was crammed with red-shirted 
Americans, who often waited months for a ship to take 
them to San Francisco, where ships were rotting three- 
deep at the wharves, while their crews went gold-hunt- 
ing. To pass the time, the Yankees scratched their 
names on the ramparts of the sea-wall, and started two 



100 Panama Past and Present 

papers, the Star and the Herald, which, after a brief 
rivalry, combined in the present Panama Star and Herald, 
a daily, printed in both Spanish and English. Trade 
boomed, brigandage flourished, and there was more hir- 
ing of mules, renting of lodgings, raising of prices, and 
fleecing of strangers, than the Isthmus had seen since 
the roarmg days of the Galleon Fair. 

As soon as California and Oregon had been taken into 
the Union, Congress had authorized a line of steamers 
to be run down either coast to the Isthmus, and had ap- 
propriated money to pay them for carrying the United 
States mail. Mr. William H. Aspinwall, who had se- 
cured the line on the Pacific side, and Mr. George Law, 
who had that on the Atlantic, combined with a third New 
York capitalist, Mr. Henry Chauncey, to build a railroad 
across the Isthmus. Chauncey and John L. Stephens, an 
experienced Central American traveler, had already ob- 
tained from the government of the Republic of New 
Granada, of which Panama was now a state, the ex- 
clusive right to build such a road; and Stephens had 
explored the route with a skilled engineer, Mr. J. L. 
Baldwin, and reported that it could be built at a profitable 
cost. 

The Panama Railroad Company was accordingly in- 
corporated, with a New York charter and a capital of 
a million dollars, and the construction of the road en- 
trusted to two experienced contractors, Colonel Totten 
and Mr. Trautwine. But no sooner had they reached 
the Isthmus than they found that the '' gold-rush," now 
fairly begun, had so raised the local prices of labor and 
materials that they begged the company to release them 



The Panama Railroad 



101 




From Harper's M:ig;iziae, by special permission ol' the publishe 

PANAMA RAILROAD IN 1855. 

from the contract. This was done, and they were re- 
tained as engineers of the company, which proceeded to 
build the road itself. 

A later survey by Baldwin and Colonel Hughes, who 
had been detailed from the United States Topographical 
Corps, had located the Pacific terminus at Panama City, 
and the Atlantic end at Navy or Limon Bay, between 
the mouth of the Chagres and Porto Bello. On Man- 
zanillo Island in this bay, some time in the month of May, 
1850, Trautwine and Baldwin struck the first blow. 



102 Panama Past and Present 

" No imposing ceremony inaugurated the breaking 
ground. Two American citizens, leaping, ax in hand, 
from a native canoe upon a wild and desolate island, their 
retinue consisting of half a dozen Indians, who clear the 
path with rude knives, strike their glittering axes into 
the nearest tree ; the rapid blows reverberate from shore 
to shore, and the stately cocoa crashes upon the beach. 
Thus unostentatiously was announced the commence- 
ment of a railway, which, from the interests and diffi- 
culties involved, might well be looked upon as one of the 
grandest and boldest enterprises ever attempted." ^ 

Space was cleared for the erection of a storehouse, but 
so unhealthy was the low, swampy coral island, awash 
at high tide, and breeding swarms of malaria-spreading 
mosquitos, that the force were obliged to live on the 
two-hundred ton brig that had brought them and their 
supplies from New York. When Colonel Totten and 
Mr. Stephens, who had been made president of the com- 
pany, arrived with more laborers from Cartagena, the 
little brig became uncomfortably overcrowded, and was 
replaced with the hull of a condemned steamer, the Tele- 
graph, brought round from the mouth of the Chagres. 

" Surveys of the island and adjacent country were now 
pushed vigorously forward. It was in the depth of the 
rainy season, and the working parties, in addition to be- 
ing constantly drenched from above, were forced to wade 
in from two to four feet of mud and water, over the 
mangrove swamps and tangled vines of the imperfect 
openings cut by the natives, who, with their machetes, 
preceded them to clear the way. Then, at night, satu- 

^ " Handbook of the Panama Railroad." 



The Panama Railroad 105 

rated and exhausted, they dragged themselves back to 
their quarters on the Telegraph, to toss until morning 
among the. pitiless insects. Numbers were daily taken 
down with fever; and, notwithstanding that the whole 
working party was changed weekly, large accessions were 
constantly needed to keep up the required force. The 
works were alternately in charge of Messrs. Totten and 
Baldwin, one attending to the duty while the other re- 
cuperated from his last attack of fever." ^ 

So they drove the line, over a trestle to the mainland, 
through the marshy lowland? to firmer ground at Mount 
Hope or Monkey Hill, then half built, half floated it over 
the deep Black Swamp to the banks of the Chagres at 
Gatun. A couple of ship loads of materials had been 
brought up the river to this point (now buried under the 
great dam) and by the first of October, 185 1, the rails 
had been laid and working trains were running as far 
as Gatun. Two large passenger steamers, unable to 
cross the bar of the Chagres in a storm, were forced to 
put into Limon Bay, and their passengers, over a thou- 
sand in number, were only too glad to ride on flat-cars 
to Gatun and begin their river journey there. 

When news of this unexpected passenger traflic 
reached New York, it sent up the value of the company's 
stock, which had fallen very low, for the original million 
dollars had been spent, and the road was far from com- 
pletion. Now the steamers came reguarly to Navy Bay, 
where docks had been built, and a settlement had grown 
up as the island was cleared. Mr. Stephens proposed 
ihat this town be given the name of one of the founders 

1" Handbook of the Panama Railroad." 
6 



io6 



Panama Past and Present 



of the railroad, and on the second of February, 1852, it 
became the city of Aspinwall. This name, however, was 
never recognized by the native authorities, who insisted 
on naming the place after Columbus, the discoverer of 
Limon Bay. Finally, after many years of trouble for 
the map-makers, the native government won the day by 




From Harper's Magazine, by special permission of tke publishers. 

GATUN STATION. 
Panama Railroad in 1855. 

refusing to deliver any more mail addressed to " Aspin- 
wall/' and the city is now called Colon, as the Spaniards 
called Columbus. 

The road was pushed on along the bank of the Chagres 
to a place called Barbacoas, an Indian word meaning 
*' bridge." And here a bridge three hundred feet long 
had to be built over a river that sometimes rose forty feet 



The Panama Railroad 107 

in a single night. About this time Mr. John L. Stephens 
died, and his successor tried the experiment of having the 
great bridge and the remainder of the line built by con- 
tract. But after a valuable year had been wasted, not a 
tenth had been completed, and the contractors were bank- 
rupt. Releasing them, the company, under a third and 
stronger president, set out to finish the work itself. 

Every effort was made to assemble a strong working 
force, and recruits were brought from the four corners 
of the earth. But northern whitemen are not made for 
pick and shovel labor in the tropics, and the hundreds of 
sturdy Irish and European peasants did little but die of 
heat and malaria. Much was expected from a thousand 
Chinese coolies, but they became so demoralized by the 
death of some of their number from fever, in this strange 
and terrible land, that they were seized with a passion 
for suicide, and scarcely two hundred left the Isthmus 
alive. Some work was done by coolies from India, but 
the best workmen were found to be negroes from Ja- 
maica and other islands in the West Indies. 

There is a popular fable, that will be told and believed 
as long as the Chagres runs to the sea, that the building 
of the Panama Railroad cost a life for every tie. But 
there were about a hundred and fifty thousand ties in the 
fifty miles of single track, and there have never been that 
many inhabitants on the Isthmus since Pedrarias the 
Cruel killed off the Indians. As a matter of fact and 
record, the total number employed, from the beginning 
of the work to the end, was about six thousand ; and the 
number of deaths eight hundred and thirty-five. Doubt- 
less many others sickened on the Isthmus, and died soon 



io8 



Panama Past and Present 



after they left it, but even so, the health of the force was 
remarkably good, for men toiling in a tropical swamp at 
a time when no doctor knew how to fight malaria and 
yellow fever. There was besides no cold storage to pre- 
serve the food, almost every mouthful of which had to 
be brought two thousand miles from New York. 

A bridge of massive timbers was thrown across the 




From Harper's Magazine, by special permission of the publishers. 

SAN PABLO STATION. 
Panama Railroad in 1855. 

Chagres at Barbacoas, and the road pushed on to the 
crest of the divide, at Culebra. In the meanwhile, men 
and materials had been shipped round the Horn, and 
eleven miles of track were laid from Panama to Culebra. 
Here, "on the twenty-seventh day of January, 1855, at 
midnight, in darkness and rain, the last rail was laid, and 
on the following day a locomotive passed from ocean to 
ocean." ^ 
1" Handbook of the Panama Railroad." 



The Panama Railroad m 

But, though open, the railroad was far from being com- 
pleted. Ravines were crossed on crazy trestles of green 
timber, the track was unballasted, and there was a great 
lack of both engines and cars. So the superintendent 
recommended that, until they were better able to handle 
traffic, most of it be kept away by charging the very high 
rates of fifty cents a mile for passengers, five cents a 
pound for baggage, and fifty cents a cubic foot for 
freight. 

" To his surprise, these provisional rates were adopted ; 
and, what is more, they remained in force for more than 
twenty years. It was found just as easy to get large 
rates as small ; and thus, without looking very much to 
the future, this goose soon began to lay golden eggs with 
astonishing extravagance. The road was .put in good 
order, with track foremen established in neat cottages 
four or five miles apart, along the whole line. New 
engines and cars were put on, commodious terminal 
wharves and other buildings provided, and all things 
were in excellent shape." ^ Trestles were made into solid 
embankments and wooden bridges replaced with iron; 
the great girder bridge at Barbacoas being the wonder 
of the time. Instead of pine, too quickly eaten up by 
ants, the ties were made of lignum- vitae, so hard that 
holes had to be bored before the spikes could be driven.^ 
The telegraph poles were made of cement, molded round 
a pine scantling, a device that seems strangely modern. 
Instead of one million dollars, the total cost of build- 

J" Handbook of the Panama Railroad." 

2 These ties were still unrotted when taken up on account of the 
relocation of the hne, in 1910. They were then made into souvenir 



canes. 



112 Panama Past and Present 

ing this fifty-mile railroad was eight milHons. But even 
before the first through track was laid, it had earned two 
million dollars' worth of fares, and duiing the first ten 
years of its existence, it took in $11,339,662.78. This 
was the Golden Age of the Panama Railroad, when it 
enjoyed the monopoly of the Atlantic trade, not only of 
California, but the entire west coast of the three Ameri- 




From Harper's Magazine, by special permission of tlie publishers. 

TERMINUS AT PANAMA. 
Panama Railroad in 1855. 

cas. Its stock earned dividends of twenty- four per cent. 
a year, and was considered one of the safest investments 
in Wall Street. 

But in the contract made between John L. Stephens 
and the government of New Granada, that government 
had been given the right to buy the Panama Railroad, 
twenty years after it was opened, for five million dollars 
— and it was now paying twenty-four per cent, on seven 
million dollars' worth of stock! At the end of the 
twelfth year, Colonel Totten went to Bogota, the capital, 
and succeeded in obtaining a new franchise for ninety- 
nine years, but at the heavy cost of a million down and 



The Panama Railroad 113 

two hundred and fifty thousand a year, with the addi- 
tional obhgation of extending the railroad to the islands 
in the Bay of Panama. 

Two years later came the completion of the Union 
Pacific Railroad, and the loss of the California trade. 
But far more important than this was the traffic with the 
west coast of South and Central America, carried almost 
entirely by the ships of a British corporation, the Pacific 
Steam Navigation Company. The incredible stupidity 
of the Panama Railroad's directors forced this company 
to abandon its shops and dockyards on the Island of 
Taboga, in the Bay of Panama, and send its ships direct 
to England through the Straits of Magellan. Too late 
they saw that most of the trade went with them. 

So, like Spain,, the Panama Railroad built a trade- 
route across the Isthmus, monopolized it, flourished, and 
decayed. Its once-prized stock became the football of 
Wall Street speculators, its tracks the traditional '' two 
streaks of rust." But unlike Spain's, its star was to rise 
again. 



CHAPTER X 

HOW THE FRENCH TRIED TO DIG THE CANAL 

THERE is a large, iron steam-launch, used by our 
government to carry sick canal-workers to the 
sanatorium on Taboga Island, that was brought to the 
Isthmus by the French, but for a very different purpose. 
With two oceans to float it in, they stuck this launch 
high and dry at the bottom of the unfinished Gaillard 
Cut, to the great astonishment of the Americans who 
found it there in 1904. It had been placed there, ex- 
plained an old employee of the French company, and a 
trench dug round it, so that when the floods of the rainy 
season filled the trench, a clever photographer could take 
a picture showing " navigation through the Cut." Such 
a picture, when exhibited in Paris, would make people 
think the work was nearly finished,, and that the money 
they had invested in it was well spent. It is a good 
illustration of how the French tried to dig the Canal. 

From the beginning, the French Canal Company 
(known in full as " La Societe International du Canal 
Interoceanique ") sailed a great many boats on dry land 
and made people believe they were afloat. They sent 
Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse of the 
French Navy, to make a survey of the Isthmus in 1877, 
and, though he never went more than two-thirds of the 
distance from Panama to Colon, he brought back com- 

114 




The French and the Canal 115 

plete plans, with the cost of construction figured out to 
within ten per cent, for a sea-level canal between the two 
cities. After a little more work on the Isthmus, next 
year, Wyse obtained a concession from the government 
at Bogota, granting the exclusive right ^ 
to build an interoceanic canal, not only 
at Panama, but anywhere else through 
the territory of the United States of 
Colombia, as New Granada was 
then called. When we remember the 
thorough preliminary surveys made for 
the Panama Railroad by Stephens and Hughes and Bald- 
win, it seems incredible that the French people should 
have taken Wyse seriously, and invested hundreds of 
millions of dollars in an enterprise of which they knew 
so little. What blinded them was the name of the man 
who now came forward as the head of that enterprise, 
Ferdinand de Lesseps. 

He was " the great Frenchman," the most popular and 
honored man in France, because of the glory he had won 
her by the construction of the Suez Canal. Sent on a dip- 
lomatic mission to Egypt, de Lesseps, though not a 
trained engineer, had recognized the ease with which a 
ship canal could be cut through the hundred miles of 
level sand that separated the Mediterranean from the 
Red Sea. It took both imagination and courage to con- 
ceive a ship canal of that length, and the greatest dif- 
ficulty, as with every new thing, lay in persuading people 
that it would not necessarily be a failure, because there 
had never been anything just like it before. The actual 
digging was as simple as making the moat round a sand 



Il6 Panama Past and Present 

castle at the seashore. A company was formed in 
France, the Khedive of Egypt took a majority of the 
stock, and forced thousands of his subjects to work as 
laborers for virtually nothing. The Suez Canal was 
completed in ten years, at a cost of a million dollars a 
mile, and ever since its opening in 1869 it has paid its 
owners handsome profits. But the bankrupt successor 
of the Khedive sold his stock to the British government, 
which has a very great interest in Suez because its ships 
must pass through there on the way to India, and to-day 
the English are the real rulers both of Egypt and the 
Suez Canal. 

De Lesseps first appeared in connection with Panama 
as chairman of the International Canal Congress held in 
Paris in May, 1879. The experienced naval officers and 
trained engineers who were invited from many different 
countries, found themselves in a helpless minority. 
Their advice was not asked, and their presence had been 
sought merely to lend dignity and a show of authority 
to M. de Lesseps's decision, already made, to build a sea- 
level canal across the Isthmus of Panama according to 
the plans of Lieutenant Wyse. The chairman allowed 
no discussion of the advantages either of a lock canal at 
Panama, or of any kind of a canal at Nicaragua, but 
forced the adoption of the type and route he favored, by 
the vote of a small majority of French admirers, very 
few of whom were practical engineers. Then, adjourn- 
ing his dummy congress, de Lesseps came forward as 
head of the French Canal Company, which had already 
paid Lieutenant Wyse $2,000,000 for his worthless sur- 
veys and valuable concessions. Finally, after everything 



The French and the Canal 117 

had been decided on, de Lesseps went to the Isthmus 
with an imposing ''Technical Commission" of distin- 
guished engineers. 

When President Roosevelt made his first inspection of 
the Panama Canal, nearly twenty-seven years afterwards, 
he went there in November, at the climax of the rainy 
season, because he wanted to see things at their worst. 
For exactly the opposite reason, de Lesseps chose De- 
cember and January, when the rains have virtually ceased, 
and the country looks its prettiest. After one trip across 
the Panama Railroad, many speeches, and no end of 
feasting and drinking of healths, he hurried away to the 
United States, where he spent a great deal more time 
trying to induce the Americans to invest money in his 
enterprise, but without much success. De Lesseps made 
another trip to the Isthmus in 1886. 

Except for these two short visits, which together 
covered barely two months, de Lesseps never set foot in 
Panama, but attempted to dig the canal from his office in 
Paris. Few people realize that to-day, or that de Lesseps 
was born as long ago as 1805. He was more than seventy 
years old, and though he knew very little about technical 
engineering, his success at Suez and the praise of flat- 
terers made him believe that he was the greatest engineer 
in the world. As he had dominated the Congress, so he 
ruled the Canal Company, absolutely and blindly. Ignor- 
ing the great differences between the level, rainless sands 
of one isthmus, and the rocky hills and flooded jungles 
of the other, de Lesseps declared that " the Panama 
Canal will be more easily begun, finished, and maintained 
than the Suez Canal." 



Il8 Panama Past and Present 

The proposed canal was to be a ditch dug down to 
twenty-seven and a half feet below sea-level, seventy-two 
feet wide at the bottom, and ninety at the water-line. 
In general, it was to follow the line of the Panama Rail- 
road, from ocean to ocean. To keep the canal from 
being flooded by the Chagres, a great dam was to be 
built across that river at a place not far below Cruces, 
called Gamboa. Because of the difference between the 
tides of the two oceans, a large tidal basin was to be dug- 
out of the swamps on the Pacific side, where the rise and 

fall is ten times 
that on the Atlan- 
tic. 

The Paris Con- 
gress thought that 
such a canal might 
be built for $214,- 
000,000. The Tech- 
nical Commission, 
after a few weeks 
J^^^m[|^^H^^^^mP| on the Isthmus, 

said that it could 
be done for $168,- 
600,000. Ferdi- 

nand de Lesseps, on 
his own responsi- 

COUNT DE LESSEPS IN x88o. ^ility, rcduced thcSC 

figures to $120,000,000, and declared that the Canal 
would be open in six years, and that enough ships would 
pass through in the first year after that to pay $18,000,- 
000 worth of tolls. Allured by these figures, and trust- 




The French and the Canal 121 

ing in the word of the " great Frenchman," hundreds of 
thousands of his countrymen invested their savings in 
the vv^orthless stock of the Canal Company. But the 
only persons who made any money out of the enterprise 
were the swindlers and speculators who used the deluded 
old man's honored name as a bait for other people's 
money. De Lesseps himself was honest, but so blinded 
by the memory of his past success that he could see noth- 
ing in Panama but another Suez. 

: Thousands of laborers and millions of dollars' worth 
of machinery were sent to the Isthmus, before the slight- 
est preparation had been made to receive them. The 
Panama Railroad refused to carry these men and mate- 
rials except as ordinary passengers and freight, at its own 
high rates. This soon forced the French Canal Company 
to buy the railroad, paying for it, including termini, $25,- 
000,000, or more than three times what it cost to build 
it. The organization and management of the road, 
however, still remained American. 

This lack of foresight was the first great cause of the 
French failure, and the second was disease. From the 
beginning, yellow fever and malaria broke out in every 
labor camp, and attacked almost every engineer and 
workman, killing hundreds, and demoralizing the rest. 
At that time, no one knew how to prevent these diseases, 
but the French tried their best to cure those that fell 
sick. They built two splendid hospitals, one on terraces 
laid out on the side of Ancon Hill, overlooking the city 
of Panama, and the other on ^iles out over the water of 
Limon Bay at Colon. In inese hospitals, the feet of 
the cots were placed in little pans of water to keep ants 



122 Panama Past and Present 

and other insects from crawling up, and no one noticed 
the mosquito '' wrigglers " swarming in the stagnant 
water of these pans, or in the many ornamental bowls of 
flowers. But when a fever patient was brought into the 
hospital, the mosquitos bred there would suck the poison 
from his blood, and quickly spread it through the un- 
screened wards. Malaria means '' bad air," and the 
French in Panama thought it was caused by the thick 
white mist that crept at night over the surface of the 
marshes, and men spoke with terror of this harmless fog 
and called it " Creeping Johnny." Every evening the 
Sisters of Charity who acted as nurses — good, pious 
women, but ignorant and untrained — would close all 
the doors and windows tight to keep out the terrible 
Creeping Johnny, and then leave their patients to spend 
the night without either attendance or fresh air. Too 
often there was more than one corpse to carry out in the 
morning. 

No proper attention was , paid to feeding the force, 
and there was altogether too .little good food, and too 
much bad liquor. Such a combination is harmful enough 
anywhere, but in the tropics it is deadly. And there was 
no lack of other evils to make it deadlier. 

'' From the time that operations were well under way 
until the end, the state of things was like the life at 
' Red Hoss Mountain/ described by Eugene Field, 

When the money flowed Hke likker . . . 
With the joints all throwed wide open 'nd no sheriff to 
demur ! 

" Vice flourished. Gambling of every kind, and every 
other form of wickedness were common day and night. 



The French and the Canal 123 

The blush of shame became virtually unknown. That vio- 
lence was not more frequent will forever remain a won- 
der ; but strange to say, in the midst of this carnival of 
depravity, life and property were comparatively safe. 
These were facts of which I was a constant witness." ^ 

This state of affairs naturally caused a great loss of 
life; exactly how great it is difficult to determine. As in 
the case of the building of the Panama Railroad, there 
has been much exaggeration and wild guessing. After 
careful research, the Secretary of the Isthmian Canal 
Commission estimated the number of deaths among the 
French and their employees at from fifteen to twenty 
thousand. 

The third great cause of the failure of the French 
Canal Company was graft. Every one connected with it 
was extravagant, and very few except M. de Lesseps were 
honest. More money was spent in Paris than ever 
reached the Isthmus, and what did come was wasted on 
almost everything but excavation. The pay roll was full 
of the names of employees whose hardest work was to 
draw their salaries. " There is enough bureaucratic work 
and there are enough officers on the Isthmus to furnish 
at least one dozen first-class republics with officials for all 
their departments. The expenditure has been simply 
colossal. One director-general lived in a mansion that 
cost over $100,000; his pay was $50,000 a year, and 
every time he went out on the line he had fifty dollars a 
day additional. He traveled in a handsome Pullman, 
car, specially constructed, which was reported to have 
cost some $42,000. Later, wishing a summer residence, 

1 Tracy Robinson, " Fifty Years in Panama." 



124 Panama Past and Present 

a most expensive building was put up near La Boca (now 
Balboa). The preparation of the grounds, the building, 
and the roads thereto, cost upwards of $150,000." ^ 

When the Americans came to the Isthmus, they found 
three of these private Pullmans, on a railroad scarcely 
fifty miles long; a stableful of carriages, and acres of 
ornamental grounds, with avenues shaded by beautiful 
royal palms from Cuba. There was one warehouse full 
of what looked like wooden snow-shovels, but were prob- 
ably designed for shoveling sand, which is not found on 
the canal line, and in another were several thousand oil 
torches for the parade at the opening of the Canal. 

When we consider these things, the wonder is, not 
that the French failed to dig the Canal, but that they dug 
as much as they did. Our army engineers speak very 
highly of their predecessors' plans and surveys. The 
French suffered, like the Scotch in Darien, from the lack 
of a leader, for there was usually a new chief engineer 
every six months, and the work was split up among six 
large contractors and many small ones. Though the 
engineers who directed the work were French, the two 
contractors who did most of the digging were not. It 
was a Dutch firm (Artigue, Sonderegger & Co.) that 
took a surprisingly large quantity of dirt out of the 
Gaillard Cut, with clumsy excavators that could only work 
in soft ground, and little Belgian locomotives and cars 
that look as if they came out of a toy-shop. The dredges 
and other floating equipment were much better, and many 
of them are still in use. Most of these dredges were 
built in Scotland. But it was an American firm (the 

^ Dr. Wolf red Nelson, " Five Years in Panama." 



The French and the Canal 127 

American Dredging and Contracting Co.) that dredged 
the opening of the Canal from Colon to beyond Gatun. 
This company was the only contractor that made an 
honest profit out of the enterprise, and its big homemade, 
wooden dredges had cut fourteen miles inland, when the 
smash came in 1889. 

Instead of the $120,000,000 originally asked for by 
M. de Lesseps, he had received and spent over $260,000,- 
000. Instead of completing the Canal in six years, his 
company had dug less than a quarter of it in nine. Not 
a stone had been laid on the proposed great dam at 
Gamboa. Nothing had been done on the tidal basin 
except to discover that a few feet under what the Tech- 
nical Commission had supposed to be an easily dredged 
swamp lay a solid ledge of hard rock. Year after year 
M. de Lesseps had kept explaining, and putting off the 
opening of the Canal, and asking for more money, until 
more had been spent than any possible traffic through 
tjje Canal could pay a profit on. Instead of finding 
Panama an easier task than Suez, the French had already 
dug 80,000,000 cubic yards, several million more than 
they did at Suez, and spent more than twice as much 
money. It was plain that the end had come. 

The French fled from the Isthmus, leaving it strewn 
as with the wreckage of a retreating army. Trains of 
dump cars stood rusting on sidings, or lay tumbled in 
heaps at the bottom of embankments. In one place, 
over fifty vine-covered locomotives can be counted at the 
edge of the jungle, from which the Americans dug out 
miles of narrow-gage track, cars, engines, and even a 
whole lost town. A lagoon near Colon was crammed 



128 Panama Past and Present 



with sunken barges and dredges. Others were aban- 
doned at the Pacific entrance, or tied up to the banks of 
the Chagres, where the shifting of the river left some of 
them far inland. Thousands of Jamaican negroes who 
had worked on the Canal had no money with which to 
return home, and either went back to the West Indies 
at the expense of the British Government, or else built 
huts and settled down in the jungle. 

A receiver was appointed for the French Canal Com- 
pany, and a careful investigation made of its affairs. 
Criminal charges were brought against de Lesseps, who 
was convicted and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. 
But the sentence was never enforced against the old and 
broken-hearted man, and in a few months he died. 
Thousands of poor people were ruined. As for the real 
culprits, several committed suicide, and others were fined 
and imprisoned. Among those found guilty were so 
many senators, deputies, and other members of the French 
Government that for a short time there seemed danger of 
a revolution and the overturning of the Republic. 

As most of the assets in the hands of the receiver con- 
sisted of the equipment and the work already done on the 
Isthmus, it was his duty to see that the enterprise was 
continued. So the French Government permitted the 
formation of the New Panama Canal Company out of 
the wreckage of the old one. This company took over 
all the machinery and buildings on the Isthmus, and in 
1894 secured a concession from Colombia to finish the 
Canal in ten years. 

The New Panama Canal Company went to work in the 
right way, and made most of the excellent surveys for 



The French and the Canal 129 

which our engineers, who have found them extremely 
valuable, have given so much credit to their French prede- 
cessors. But the new company had so little money that 
it could keep only a few hundred men and two or three 
excavators busy in the Cut. It became plainer every 
year that the Canal could never be finished by 1904, and 
that the company's only hope was to find a purchaser. 
And every one knew that the only possible purchaser was 
the United States Government. 



CHAPTER XI 

HOW PANAMA BECAME A REPUBLIC 

BUT I should wonder," said Goethe, as the great Ger- 
man poet was discussing with his friends, in 1827, 
the possibility of a Panama Canal, '' if the United States 
were to let an opportunity escape of getting such a work 
into their own hands. It ma}^ be foreseen that this young 
state, with its decided predilection to the West, will, in 
thirty or forty years, have occupied and peopled the large 
tract of land beyond the Rocky Mountains. It may, 
furthermore, be foreseen that along the whole coast of 
the Pacific Ocean, where nature has already formed the 
most capacious and secure harbors, important commercial 
towns will gradually arise, for the furtherance of a great 
intercourse between China and the East Indies and the 
United States. In such a case it would be not only de- 
sirable but almost necessary that a more rapid communi- 
cation should be maintained between the eastern and 
western shores of North America, both by merchant 
vessels and men-of-war, than has hitherto been possible 
with the tedious, disagreeable and expensive voyage 
round Cape Horn. I, therefore, repeat that it is abso- 
lutely indispensable for the United States to effect a 
passage from the Mexican Gulf to the Pacific Ocean, and 
I am certain that they will do it." 

Less than twenty years after this prophecy, the United 

130 



How Panama Became a Republic 133 

States, by the treaty of 1846, obtained from New Gra- 
nada the perpetual right of transit for its citizens across 
the Isthmus of Panama, promising in return both to 
maintain the neutrahty of any trade-routes that might be 
buih there, and to guard the local government against 
attack by any foreign power. And ever since the making 
of this treaty and the building of the Panama Railroad, 
the Isthmus has been kept alive by American business 
and kept more or less peaceful by American ships and 
guns. 

Left to itself, the Isthmus would have been anything 
but peaceful. In the fifty-seven years between the treaty 
of 1846 and the final revolution in 1903, there were at 
least fifty-three disturbances and outbreaks, beginning 
with a riot in which two Americans were killed, and end- 
ing with a civil war nearly three years long. Six times 
our warships had to clear for action and land sailors and 
marines to protect life and property, and at four other 
times the government at Bogota begged that United 
States troops be sent to Panama. This may surprise 
many people who believe that nothing of the kind ever 
happened in that country before 1903, but there were 
revolutions in Panama not only before then, and before 
1846, but even before Nathaniel Bacon, our own first 
" revolutionist," rose against the royal governor of Vir- 
ginia, and burned Jamestown in 1676. To understand 
this properly we must go back to the time of .Balboa. 

Balboa, Pizarro, Cortez, and all the other conquista- 
dores, were men of the Middle Ages, living by the sword 
and despising honest labor. They were robber-barons, 
forcing the conquered Indians to pay them tribute in 



134 Panama Past and Present 

food and gold, and when there were no native warriors 
left to fight, they turned their swords against one another. 
And when, in 1543, the Emperor Charles V, urged by 
the good bishop Las Casas, decreed in his " New Laws 
for the Indies " that no more Indians must be enslaved 
or cruelly treated, Spain nearly lost America at that time, 
instead of two centuries and a half later. A fleet from 
Peru captured and plundered Old Panama, and, when 
reinforced and joined by the Panamanians, the Peruvians 
seized the whole Isthmus and held it in the name of 
Pizarro/ Instead of an army, Charles V sent Pedro de 
la Gasca, a clever, smooth-tongued priest, who won back 
the leaders at Panama to allegiance to the emperor, and 
with their aid put down the rebellion in Peru. As Pedro 
de la Gasca was about to take ship for Spain at Nombre 
de Dios, after his triumphal return from Peru, the Con- 
treras brothers, turbulent grandsons of old Pedrarias, 
came down the Pacific coast after raising a successful 
rebellion in Nicaragua, suddenly captured Old Panama 
and started to march across the Isthmus. But the citi- 
zens rose behind them, and the Contreras " revolution " 
came to a sudden and bloody end. 

These old, half-forgotten fights among the early Span- 
ish colonists in iVmerica were the children of all the feudal 
wars of Spain, and the fathers of all the nineteenth- 
and twentieth-century revolutions of Spanish America. 
Fear of Drake and the bucaneers made the once-turbu- 
lent colonists glad to submit to the royal will for as much 
protection as the King could give them. He ruled like a 
feudal overlord, — a big bully over a crowd of little ones, 

1 Gonzalo Pizarro, brother and successor of the conqueror of Peru. 



How Panama Became a Republic 137 

— and when his power was ended, they all started up 
again. The Spanish Americans had nothing like the 
training in self-government and respect for law and 
order that our ancestors received both in England and 
here, for centuries before they won independence. The 
Spanish Americans have had to work it all out for them- 
selves in the last hundred years or so, and a wonderfully 
good job they have made of it in that time; particularly 
in the big, stable republics of the south temperate zone. 
But in too many of the little countries along the shore of 
the Caribbean, — the region which a great American 
statesman has called " the land of the fantastic and the 
unexpected," men still prefer to vote as their forefathers 
did, with swords and cannon. Of all these backward 
countries, the one that has changed least since the days of 
the conquistadores is Colombia. 

Panama was too small a state to stand alone, after it 
became independent of Spain, and accepted an invitation 
from Bogota to put itself under the government there, 
but quickly found that it had exchanged King Log for 
King Stork. Almost immicdiately there were attempted 
revolts, and twice, in 1830 and again ten years later, the 
Isthmus won complete independence, and only returned 
to New Granada on promises of better treatment, sol- 
emnly made, but never realized. It was furthermore 
recognized, and set forth in the Constitution of that 
country, that Panama was a sovereign state, and that it 
or any one of the others had as much right to withdraw 
and set up an independent government as Virginia or 
New York or Massachusetts had under the old Articles 
of Confederation. 



138 Panama Past and Present 

But constitutions and written laws have never been 
worth much in those parts, except for musket-wadding. 
The local idea of government was to put yourself in 
power and then squeeze all the taxes you could out of 
everybody else. Nobody ever became president of New 
Granada or Colombia except by violence, and no presi- 
dent was strong enough to keep peace in Panama. 

Revolutions, like every other industry, were revived on 
the Isthmus by the coming of the forty-niners and the 
building of the railroad. The Spaniards there have al- 
ways been predatory by choice, and as they had lived off 
the Indians in the old days, they now lived off the Ameri- 
cans and other travelers. It is the old story of the 
robber-barons of a trade-route, fighting each other and 
their equally greedy overlord for the privilege of extort- 
ing toll from the traders passing through their territory. 
Panama in the nineteenth century was still in the Middle 
Ages. The landward walls of the city were torn down 
less than fifty years ago, and underground passages still 
connect the fortress-like, town houses of the haciendados, 
the rich landowners who used to make revolutions and 
fight them with armies of peons from their great estates, 
led by bands of foreign mercenaries or soldiers of for- 
tune. These were the barons, and the overlord was the 
federal government at Bogota, which exercised absentee 
tyranny of the worst kind. 

As the Panamanians were not strong enough to win 
independence, nor the Bogota government to keep good 
order, every revolution either degenerated into brigand- 
age, or was stopped by American intervention. For the 
burden of this disorder fell not so heavily on the in- 



How Panama Became a Republic 139 

habitants of a region where there are no industries, and 
a poor man can gather a week's food in half an hour's 
walk through the jungle, as on the foreign merchants 
and traders, particularly the American-owned Panama 
Railrpad. This company organized a police force of its 
own, called the Isthmus Guard, in 1855, and these fifty or 
so men, led by Ran Runnels, a Texas ranger, cleared the 
country of outlaws so thoroughly that in a few months 
they had abolished their own jobs. But only two years 
later, a dispute over the price of a slice of watermelon 
started a riot in which several American travelers were 
killed and hundreds of others, including many women, 
terrorized and plundered by the mob, the police and 
troops making no effort to stop the looting, but, in- 
stead, preventing the ' Americans from defending 
themselves. 

Again and again our intervention was called for, and 
not always to defend our own people. Ferdinand de 
Lesseps brought fresh millions for the hungry, and his 
company was robbed by the local authorities almost as 
enthusiastically as by its own employees. During the 
scramble, revolutionists seized and burned Colon, with a 
great quantity of French canal stores. American 
marines were landed, restored order, and set the Co- 
lombian Humpty Dumpty up on his wall again. This 
was in 1885^ and the successful generd who made him- 
self president that year proclaimed a new constitution 
which deprived Panama of all its rights as a sovereign 
state, and made it a mere province under the direct con- 
trol of the federal government at Bogota. Naturally 
there was great indignation on the Isthmus, and from 



140 Panama Past and Present 

then until the end there was an almost constant series of 
attempts to gain freedom. 

The enforced dash of the battle-ship Oregon around 
South America in the Spanish-American War woke up 
the United States to its need of a qmcker naval route 
between the two coasts. Congress authorized the pur- 
chase of the rights and property of the New French Canal 
Company for $40,000,000,^ an offer which that company 
was only too glad to accept, for, in 1903, its ten-year 
concession had nearly expired, and in another twelve 
months it might have no rights left to sell. We then 
offered the government of Colombia $10,000,000 for its 
permission to the Canal Company to make the sale, and 
for a new concession to the United States, allowing us to 
build and maintain the Canal. 

The government of the so-called Republic of Colombia 
consisted, at this time, of one man, who had been elected 
vice-president but had kidnapped the president with a 
troop of cavalry and shut him up in an unsanitary dun- 
geon, where he soon died. This interesting brigand had 
ruled ever since as president, without bothering about a 
congress, until he called one for the sole purpose of con- 
sidering this offer of the United States. Hoping to get 
a higher price, and making no secret of their intention to 
\Vait until the French concession should run out and then 
demand some or all of the forty millions for themselves, 
the Colombian congress rejected our offer. They for- 
got what it meant to Panama. 

Every inhabitant of the Isthmus knew that if the 
United States were not allowed to build the Canal there, 

1 See Appendix, vakiation of this purchase. 



I'r 




How Panama Became a Republic 143 

it would build one across Nicaragua, where an American 
company already had a concession. If that were done, 
not only would Panama lose all its hoped-for prosperity, 
but even the railroad would cease to be operated, and the 
Isthmus would have as little trade or importance as in 
the eighteenth century. Naturally the Panamanians 
watched the Colombian congress anxiously, and, as soon 
as they saw the American treaty was doomed, began to 
prepare for a revolution. 

Everything was in their favor. The garrison had been 
left unpaid so long and had so many friends and sweet- 
hearts among the citizens that it was easily won over. 
Companies of men were organized, ostensibly as a fire- 
department, and rifles for them were smuggled in from 
New York. (There is as much romance and wickedness 
in the secret gun-trade of that city to-day as there ever 
was in bucaneering). Soon every prominent man on 
the Isthmus was in the plot, except the governor, who 
shut his eyes to it. Instead of the usual carpet-bagger 
from Bogota, the newly appointed governor was Sefior 
Jose Domingo de Obaldia, a man whose family have 
lived on the Isthmus for centuries, and he frankly told 
the Colombians that if the treaty were rejected, Panama 
would revolt, and he would do nothing to prevent it. 

The treaty was rejected, and a date was at once set 
for the uprising. But the day before, a Colombian gun- 
boat steamed into the harbor of Colon, with four hundred 
and seventy-four conscripts and a few generals, who 
landed and demanded a train to take them to Panama 
City. The Bogota government had at last become aware 
"Df the unsettled state of affairs on the Isthmus, which the 



144 



Panama Past and Present 



American newspapers had been discussing openly for a 
month, and had sent this force to put an end to it — 
which it did, but not in the way they expected. 

The Panama Railroad officials, whose sympathies w^re 
all with the revolutionists, sternly refused to let the army 
ride without paying cash fare. So the generals and their 
staff" went on alone to Panama, to take command of the 
troops there. The revolutionists, warned by telegraph, 
hastened their preparations and when the generals en- 
tered the barrack square, the soldiers, 
instead of presenting arms, seized them 
and locked them up. At once the flag 
of the new Republic of Panama was 
run up over the city, and on two of the 
three gunboats in the harbor. The third 
fired a few shells, killing one Chinaman, 
and then sailed back to Colombia. 

Colonel Torres, who had been left in command of the 
Colombian troops at Colon, angrily declared that if the 
generals were not released and the new flags hauled down 
within an hour, he would kill every American in Colon. 
The women and children at once took refuge on two 
steamers, and the men gathered in the stone freight-house 
of the Panama Railroad, which had been strongly built 
for just such emergencies. But there was a small Ameri- 
can gunboat, the Nashville, at Colon, and her captain 
landed forty-two sailors and marines. Torres then de- 
clared his great love for Americans, and a few days later 
he and his conscripts were bought up by the Panama- 
nians for about twenty dollars apiece, and shipped back 
to where they came from. 




How Panama Became a Republic 147 



The Isthmus was now entirely in the hands of its own 
people, as it had been three times before ; and three Imes 
of action were open to the United States. The first was 
to intervene and force the Panamanians back under the 
rule of Bogota, the second was to let the two sides fight 
it out * to a finish. But we had tried both of these 
remedies again and again for over fifty years, and 
neither had availed to stop the endless bloodshed and 
destruction of property. The third course was to recog- 
nize the independence of the Republic of Panama, and 
forbid Colombia, now a foreign power, to land troops 
on the Isthmus. That was what President Roosevelt 
did, and the judgment of the American people was 
summed up in a remark made by a western congressman : 
" When that jack-rabbit jumped, I 'm glad we did n't 
have a bow-legged man for President." 

To any one acquainted with the history of the Isthmus,, 
the Revolution of 1903, though almost equally sudden, 
appears no less natural than the 
jump of a startled jackrabbit; 
and indeed there was fifty times 
as much reason for it as for 
any of the fifty or more revolts 
that preceded it. ^ Much as we 
v/anted Panama, the Panaman- 
ians wanted us more, and if 
there was one thing experience 




had taught them it was how to 



COAT OF ARMS OF THE 
REPUBLIC OF PANAMA. 



organize a revolution. The 

charge that our government had " conspired " to 

bring it about was brought by persons utterly ignorant of 



148 Panama Past and Present 

the facts, flatly denied by President Roosevelt and his 
Secretary of State, Johy Hay ; and the most rigid investi- 
gations by Congress have failed to reveal the slightest 
evidence either of the existence of such a conspiracy, or 
of the need of any external incentive for the Isthmus to 
revolt. 

The same orders were given the commanders of our 
v^ar-ships as in several previous revolutions: to allow 
neither belligerent to land men or arms within fifty miles 
of either Panama or Colon. Colombia talked much of 
marching an army overland to the Isthmus, but that trail 
runs through the land of the San Bias Indians, and it 
would take' a very strong army of white men to fight 
their way through that region, either then or to-day. 
Certain San Bias chiefs who had been made colonels in 
the Colombian army refused to fight the Panamanians; 
and the country of these Indians, though nominally in 
one or the other of the two republics, has been really an 
independent buffer state between them ever since 1903. 

The Republic of Panama was quickly organized, with 
a constitution modeled on that of the United States, and 
a treaty was made between the two countries, by which 
the United States received the perpetual right to build 
and maintain a canal across the Isthmus, in return for 
the payment of $10,000,000. It also acquired possession 
of the Canal Zone, a strip of land five miles wide on 
either side of the Canal, and this bit of Central America 
is now as much United States territory as the parade- 
ground at West Point. The two cities of Panama and 
Colon, however, were scalloped out of either end of the 
Zone and left part of the republic,- but their ports. Balboa 



How Panama Became a Republic 149 

and Cristobal, became American, and the United States 
Government obtained the right to keep Panama and 
Colon clean, and to interfere whenever it thinks the 
native authorities cannot keep good order. For Uncle 
Sam was determined to make an end of filth and fever 
and petty warfare on the Isthmus, and get to work. 



CHAPTER XII 

HOW THE ISTHMUS WAS MADE HEALTHY 

THE New French Canal Company lost no time in 
accepting the $40,000,000, and its representative 
on the Isthmus formally turned over possession to the 
United States on May eighth, 1904. At this time, only 
about six hundred West Indians were working in th^ 
Cut, with a few side-excavators and trains of four- 
wheeled dump-cars, and an impatient call went up from 
the American people for their government to " make the 
dirt fly ! "^ But for the next two and a half years, there 
was very little digging and a great deal of preparation. 

Instead of hurrying thousands of laborers to the Isth- 
mus to have them die there, as they did in the fifties and 
eighties, of fever and insufficient food, we cleaned house 
before we moved in. Clearings were made in the jungle, 
* swamps were drained, old French houses were repaired 
and new ones were built. A line of steamers fitted with 
cold storage brought food from New York, and hotels 
or mess-houses served it to the men. The French hos- 
pitals at Ancon and Colon were enlarged, and the dirty 
little cities of Panama and Colon were cleaned and made 
sanitary. But though the filth was gone the fever re- 
mained. 

In the same way, Havana and Santiago de Cuba, cities 
which old shipmasters declared they could smell ten miles 

150 




SURGEON-GENERAL WILLIAM C. GORGAS. 



The Isthmus Made Healthy 153 

to sea in an offshore breeze, had been thoroughly cleaned 
by our army as soon as the Spaniards evacuated Cuba in 
1898, but still our soldiers had kept dying of yellow fever 
there. Everything that medical science could suggest 
was done to stop the spread of the disease, but without 
effect. Thousands sickened and hundreds died, while 
the doctors stood by, as one of them declared, " in utter 
perplexity and wonder." 

No one knew how yellow fever was spread, though its 
ravages had been only too well known for two centuries 
and more. It had killed over thirty-six thousand people 
in Havana and a hundred and thirty thousand in Spain ; 
it had swept our coast from Massachusetts to Florida, 
killing one person out of every ten in Philadelphia in 
1793, and over forty thousand in New Orleans between 
then and the end of the nineteenth century. Though 
other diseases, notably tuberculosis, have caused and still 
are causing much more direct suffering and loss of life, 
they w^ere less feared because they lacked the terror of 
the unknown. When yellow fever broke out in a city, 
it was as if the very Angel of Death had come, walking 
invisible and slaying without cause. Then followed wnld 
stampedes, brutally checked by " shotgun quarantines," 
looting, debauchery, and a wide-spread paralysis of busi- 
ness, causing altogether a loss of life and property im- 
possible to compute. 

Two things held yellow fever in check ; frost stopped 
it, and those that recovered from the first attack were 
immune for the rest of their lives. Several regiments of 
these " immunes " were raised during the Spanish-Amer- 
ican War, but there were not enough of them to garrison 

8 



154 Panama Past and Present 

all Cuba, and the disease soon broke out among the other 
troops sent there. Among non-immunes, and below the 
frost-line, what hope was there of stopping the spread 
of yellow fever? Only that some hero might strip this 
giant of his invisible coat, and, by showing what path he 
followed from death-bed to death-bed, enable us to 
guard and close it. That hero came, and in all our his- 
tory there is no nobler story than that of his triumphant 
sacrifice. 

It had long been suspected by several doctors that the 
germs of yellow fever were carried to fresh victims, 
neither by contact nor in infected clothing, but by certain 
species of mosquitos. Dr. Carlos Finlay, an old Ha- 
vana physician, had declared this belief as early as 1883. 
But no one could say for certain, because yellow fever 
is a disease that attacks only human beings, and to make 
the necessary experiments there were required, not mice 
or guinea-pigs, but living men. 

One night in July, 1900, four surgeons of the United 
States Army Medical Corps met in Havana, where they 
had been sent as a Yellow-Fever Commission, and de- 
cided that the time had come when these experiments 
must be made. With full knowledge of the fearful na- 
ture of the disease, these doctors agreed that before they 
called for others to volunteer, they would make the first 
experiments on their own bodies. 

But one of the four, Dr. Aristides Agramonte, a 
Cuban, was an immune and therefore could take no part 
in the tests; and another, Major Walter Reed, was al- 
most immediately recalled to Washington. The two 
others, Jesse William Lazear, an American, and James 



The Isthmus Made Healthy 157 

Carroll, an Englishman, let themselves be bitten by mos- 
quitos that had sucked the blood of yellow- fever pa- 
tients. The experiment .v^as but too successful. Both 
took the disease, Carroll recovered, but Lazear died. 
" Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay 
down 'his life for his friends." 

A tablet, erected to the memory of Lazear, in Johns 
Hopkins Hospital at Baltimore, bears this inscription, 
written by President Eliot of Harvard University: 

*' With more than the courage and the devotion of the 
soldier, he risked and lost his life to show how a fearful 
pestilence is communicated and how its ravages may be 
prevented." 

Volunteers were called for, that further experiments 
might be made, and General Leonard Wood, then mili- 
tary governor of Cuba, offered to pay each a reward of 
$200. When this was explained to the first men who 
came forward, two young soldiers from Ohio, John R. 
Kissinger and John J. Moran, both refused to accept it, 
declaring that they had volunteered '' solely in the inter- 
est of humanity and the cause of science." Major Reed, 
to whom this declaration was made, rose to his feet, 
raised his hand to his forehead as if in the presence of 
his superior officer and said to these humble enlisted 
men, " Gentlemen, I salute you." When Major Reed 
told of this incident, not long afterwards, he declared, 
*' In my opinion, this exhibition of moral courage has 
never been surpassed in the annals of the army of the 
United States." 

Thanks to the skill of Major Reed, none of the thirteen 
men Avho followed the splendid example of Carroll and 



158 Panama Past and Present 

Lazear lost their lives ; though some permitted themselves 
to be bitten by infected mosquitos and so took the fever, 
v^hile their comrades entered a little room as dark and 
airless as the Black Hole of Calcutta, and slept there for 
three v^eeks, between blankets taken from the beds where 
yellow-fever patients had died. These last suffered 
nothing worse than discomfort, and it was conclusively 
proved that yellow fever is carried by the bite of a single 
species of mosquito; the Stegomyia fasciata, and by 
nothing else. This discovery, which has been truly said 
to be worth more than the entire cost of the Spanish 
War, gave the doctors something tangible to fight. Reed 
and Carroll drew up a complete program for protecting 
patients and killing off the mosquitos, and by putting it 
vigorously into effect, freed Cuba from yellow fever 
within a year. 

Among Major Reed's assistants in Havana was Dr. 
William C. Gorgas, who was made chief sanitary officer 
of the Canal Zone shortly after the Americans came to 
Panama. Here he was confronted with a problem al- 
most exactly like that which he had already seen solved 
in Cuba. All that was required was the intelligent and 
vigorous application of the principles discovered by the 
sacrifice of Lazear and elaborated by Carroll and Reed. 
Unfortunately, Dr. Gorgas was badly handicapped at the 
start by the failure of the United States Government to 
supply him with the force and funds necessary to do 
this. 

The natural result was an outbreak of yellow fever, in 
Panama, in the spring and summer of 1905. Thirty- 
five of the American employees died, and hundreds more 



The Isthmus Made Healthy 159 

fled north as fast as they could find deck-room on the 
crowded ships. There they filled the newspapers with 
panic-stricken interviews and doleful prophecies that the 
Canal would never be built, and fervidly quoted this well- 
known stanza from the works of Gilbert, the poet of 
Colon. 

Beyond the Chagres River, 

'T is said (the story 's old) 

Are paths that lead to mountains 

Of purest virgin gold ; 

But 't is my firm conviction, 

Whate'er the tales they tell. 

That beyond the Chagres River, 

All paths lead straight to Hell! 

" There are three diseases in Panama," declared Mr. 
John L. Stevens, who became chief engineer at this 
time, " They are yellow fever, malaria, and cold feet ; 
and the greatest of these is cold feet." 

But now Dr. Gorgas was given his long-delayed medi- 
cal supplies, his water-pipes, porch-screens, and plenty 
of money. Thousands of men were taken from the 
excavating force to swell the sanitary-squad. Best 
of all, the new governor of the Canal Zone — to 
whom the head of the Department of Sanitation was 
then subordinate — was Mr. Charles E. Magoon, who 
helped Dr. Gorgas with the greatest good-will and 
energy. 

The first thing was to establish a rigid quarantine at 
both ports, to prevent new cases being brought in from 
other countries by sea. Every ship that came from a 
yellow-fever port was thoroughly fumigated to kill any 
infected mosquitos that might be on board, and all the 



i6o Panama Past and Present 

passengers were kept in a screened house, where no local 
mosquitos could get at them, until long after the time 
required for the development and discovery of any pos- 
sible fever-case among them. Without sick people to 
bite, the mosquitos could get no germs to carry, and, 
contrariwise, without the Stegomyia mosquito, the germs 
could not be carried from one person to another. Dr. 
Gorgas and his little army attacked the enemy from both 
directions at once. 

The two great strongholds of the disease were the cities 
of Panama and Colon. Here the sanitary control which 
we had obtained by treaty-right was greatly helped by the 
fortunate fact that the first President of the Republic 
of Panama was Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero, a well- 
trained physician and an authority on tropical diseases. 
At his suggestion, native doctors were appointed sanitary 
inspectors, and they did their work far more tactfully 
and with less friction than American inspectors could 
possibly have done, among a Spanish-speaking popula- 
tion, virtually all of whom were immune to yellow fever 
and had no idea of sanitation. They submitted with 
the greatest good-nature to having their houses entered 
and searched for yellow-fever patients, and during the 
worst of the epidemic, every house in Panama City was 
visited every day. As soon as a new case was discov- 
ered, the sick man was carried to the hospital in a 
screened ambulance, and his house and those of his 
neighbors were tightly sealed up with strips of paper and 
fumigated with sulphur, after which the dead mosquitoes 
were carefully swept up and burned. Then detective 
work would begin in two different directions: watching 




DR. JUAN GUITERAS. DR. JOHN R. ROSS, U.S.N. DR. JAMES CARROLL, U.S.V. 

JESSE W. LAZEAR, U.S.V. DR. CARLOS FINLAY. MAJOR WALTER REED, U.S.A 

JOHN R. KISSINGER. 



The Isthmus Made Healthy 163 

for new cases caused by mosquitos that might have 
bitten this man; and tracing back the source of his infec- 
tion to some earher and perhaps hitherto undiscovered 
case. 

This would have been a well-nigh impossible task if 
the yellow-fever mosquito had been as strong on the 
wing as the more harmless species we know so well at 
home, most of whom can fly for miles with a favorable 
breeze. Fortunately, the Stcgomyia is a feeble creature, 
usually living in or about houses, and rarely flying more 
than a hundred yards from its birthplace in some stag- 
nant pool. The favorite breeding-places of these insects 
in Panama City were the rain-water barrels and cisterns, 
which were first screened and afterwards destroyed when 
the new waterworks were finished. 

The old waterworks consisted of two or three large 
Spanish wells, that received most of the drainage from 
the graveyard, and a few carts, from which the man who 
owned the graveyard used to peddle this water through 
the streets, for five cents a gallon. It was much better 
for his business than for the people who drank it. The 
Americans stopped this, and piped in good water from a 
reservoir made by damming the Rio Grande. There was 
a great celebration on the Fourth of July, 1905, when 
the water was turned on in the Cathedral Plaza. The 
President, and the Governor, and all the other dignitaries, 
both Panamanian and American, attended a solemn high 
Mass in the cathedral, and at the elevation of the Host 
and the stroke of noon, the water was sent spurting into 
the air outside, and the Panamanian Republican Band 
struck up what it thought was the American national 



164 Panama Past and Present 

anthem. It was a popular tune of the period, called 
'^Mr. Dooley"! 

Sewers were laid at the same time as the water-pipes, 
and the big clumsy cobblestones were ground up in porta- 
ble rock-crushers to make a concrete bed for the smooth 
new pavements of vitrified brick. Formerly, garbage of 
all sorts was thrown out into the streets to rot there or 
be eaten by the hundreds of vultures that were the only 




THE OLD WATER DEPARTMENT OF PANAMA. 

street-cleaning department. But now the streets are 
swept every night by gangs of negroes, employed by 
the Panamanian Government, under American super- 
vision. 

In sanitation as in politics, we found Panama a city 
of the Middle Ages. Our doctors discovered a few 
wretched lunatics chained to the damp walls of the seven- 
teenth-century dungeons, hewn out of the rock beneath 
the sea-wall ; and lepers, who lived on the beach outside 
the city wall, and dared not come too near, lest people 
call out, " Unclean ! Unclean ! " and stone them, exactly 
as they did in Old Testament times. Though these un- 



The Isthmus Made Healthy 165 

fortimates had no claim on our charity, our government 
at once built a modern insane asylum, first at Miraflores, 
and later at the Ancon hospital, and moved the lepers to 
a very beautiful little settlement called Palo Seco. 
There they are so w^ell cared for that one man, whom our 
army doctors cured of a slight case of the disease, begged 
to be allowed to stay in that place for the rest of his life, 
and was made a hospital orderly there. 

Driven out of the two cities, the harried Stegomyia 
found no refuge in the Canal Zone. There Dr. Gorgas's 
men cut down hundreds of acres of sheltering brush and 
high grass, dug miles of drainage ditches and covered all 
undrained pools and swamps with heavy oil that killed 
the mosquito larvae whenever they came to the surface to 
breathe. Holes were blown in old French dump-cars to 
keep them from holding water. To throw an empty 
tin can where it might become a breeding-place for mos- 
quitoes was made a finable ofifense. 

The epidemic of 1905 came to an end in September 
and the panic stopped with it. The last case of yellow 
fever on the Isthmus was in November, 1906. To-day, 
the Stegomyia mosquito is virtually extinct there, and so 
long as it is kept down and all foreign cases of the dis- 
ease kept out, there will never be any more danger of an 
epidemic of yellow fever at Panama than at the North 
Pole. There is still a certain amount of " Chagres 
fever," which is nothing more or less than malaria. For 
the Anopheles mosquito, that carries the germ of this 
disease — a fact discovered by Dr. Ronald Ross of the 
British Army, in India in 1898 — is a much stronger and 
hardier insect than the Stegomyia, and it is almost im- 



l66 Panama Past and Present 

possible to destroy it completely, especially round the 
smaller construction camps in the jungle. But there is 
much less malaria in Panama than in most parts of the 
United States. 

One of the greatest and least-known triumphs of Dr. 
Gorgas and his organization was keeping the Isthmus 
free from the bubonic plague, at a time when this terrible 
disease, the " Black Death " that swept through Europe 
in the fourteenth century, was raging in the other Pacific 
ports both north and south of Panama. There it was 
confined to the three original cases brought in by sea, 
all of which proved fatal. This disease is carried, not 
by mosquitos, but by fleas, that travel on the backs of 
rats. A reward of ten cents was promptly offered for 
every rat tail brought in, and the rat is now a very scarce 
animal in Panama. 

Dr. Gorgas was promoted to the rank of colonel in the 
United States Army Medical Corps, and made a mem- 
ber of the Isthmian Canal Commission in 1907.^ Though 
he has turned Panama from a pest-hole into a health re- 
sort, there is still no lack of work there for him and for 
those who will come after him, for only by constant 
vigilance and costly sanitation can large bodies of 
Northern white men be kept healthy in the tropics. 
Moreover, if yellow fever or any other dangerous disease 
were ever again allowed to break out there, after Panama 
has become one of the great highways of the world, the 
Canal might easily prove as great a curse to humanity as 
it promises to be a blessing, for then ships would carry 
the sickness all too swiftly to all parts of the earth. 

1 He was appointed Surgeon-General of the United States Army, 
January 16, 1914. 



The Isthmus Made Healthy 167 

Few physicians have ever had laid upon them a heavier 
burden or a more sacred trust than that of the chief 
sanitary officer of the Canal Zone, and all the world 
knows how well General Gorgas has discharged it. His 
name will go down in history as that of the man who 
freed the Isthmus from its most terrible enemy. 

But General Gorgas would be the last man to deny that 
if it had not been for the work of his old chief and as- 
sociates in Cuba in 1900-01, neither he nor any other 
man would have known how to fight yellow fever on the 
Isthmus in 1905. And if ever a fitting monument is 
raised, either in Panama or in the United States, to cele- 
brate the building of the Canal and the victory of man- 
kind over yellow fever, there should be graven high upon 
it the names of Reed and Carroll and Lazear. 



CHAPTER XIII 



TO give a complete history of the building of the 
Canal, from the arrival of the first American steam- 
shovel to the final merging of the construction into the 
operating force, v^ould take a library of little books like 
this. The best I can hope for is to give the reader some 
slight idea of what we might have seen, had we crossed 
the Isthmus together, in the days of the canal-builders. 
Let us imagine that we are taking such a trip. 

As we steam into Limon Bay, after a two-thousand- 
mile voyage from New York, you will notice the long 
breakwater that is being built out from Toro Point, to 
make this a safe harbor, and also to keep storms and 
tides from washing the mud back into the four miles 
of canal that run under the sea to deep water. Down 
this channel comes something that looks like g, very fat 
ocean steamer, and when it reaches the end it rises sev- 
eral feet in the water, turns round, and waddles back 
again. This is the sea-going dredge Caribbean, busy 
sucking up the bottom into its insides, and carrying it 
away. This craft is painted white, with a bufT super- 

1 The greater part of this chapter originally appeared in St. Nich- 
olas, in February, 1912, and no better time could have been chosen 
for a trip to Panama, either in the flesh or in print. Then the great 
work, though SO near completion that it was possible to see in it the 
finished design, was still being pushed with undiminished vigor. 

168 



How We Arc Building the Canal 169 

structure, as our warships used to be, and when it first 
came to the Isthmus, the quarantine officer put on riis 
best suit of white duck, and went out to take breakfast 
on board the " battleship." Many other smaller dredges 
are dipping up rock into barges or pumping mud through 
long pipes to the land, all the way to the shore, and up 
the four miles of sea-level canal to where the Gatun 
Locks loom in the distance. All this you can see as w^e 
cross the bay to the ugly town of Colon, and its pretty 
suburb of Cristobal, which last is in the American Canal 
Zone, and the place where the steamers dock. 

Now that you have seen what these dredges can do, 
you will ask me why we do not dig the rest of the Canal 
that way, instead of bothering with locks and dams, and 
I can give you the answer in five words: because of the 
Chagres River. This troublesome stream, as you can 
see by the map on page 4, comes down from the San 
Bias hills, strikes the line of the Canal at a place called 
" Bas Obispo," and zigzags across it to Gatun. And 
though we can dredge a channel up to Gatun, or scoop 
out the Gaillard Cut, which is an artificial cafion nine miles 
long through the hills between Bas Obispo and Pedro 
Miguel, on the Pacific side of the divide, we could not 
dig below the bed of the Chagres without having a lot of 
waterfalls pouring into the Canal, washing down the 
banks and silting up the channel. And as the Chagres 
is a sizable river that has been known to rise more than 
twenty-five feet in a night — for the rainfall at Panama 
is very severe — you can see that it is no easy problem 
to control it. But we have solved that problem by means 
of the Gatun Dam. 



lyo Panama Past and Present 

At Gatim, the valley of the Chagres is only about 
a mile and a quarter wide, and by closing the gap be- 
tween the hills on either side with an artificial hill — for 
that is what the Gatun Dam really is — we accomplish 
two things : first, by backing up the river behind the dam, 
we form a deep lake that will float our ships up against 
the side of the hills at Bas Obispo, and make so much 
less digging in the Gaillard Cut ; and, second, a flood that 
would cause a rise of twenty-five feet in the river would 
not cause one of a quarter of an inch in the big lake, 
that will have an area of nearly two hundred square 
miles. 

In building the dam that is to hold back all this water, 
two trestles were driven across the valley, and from them 
were dumped many train-loads of hard rock from the 
Gaillard Cut, to form what the engineers call the '' toes " 
of the dam. To fill the space between them, dredges 
pump in muddy water that filters away between the 
cracks of the toes, leaving the sediment it carried to settle 
and form a solid core of hard-packed clay, over a quar- 
ter of a mile thick. When the dam is finished, the side 
toward the lake will be thoroughly riprapped with stone 
to prevent washing by the waves, and so gentle will be 
the slope that you could ride over it on a bicycle without 
rising on the pedals. 

To keep the water from running over the top of 
the dam, the engineers have cut a new channel for the 
Chagres through a natural hill of rock that stands in the 
center of the valley, and this, lined with concrete and 
fitted with regulating works, is what they call the '' spill- 
way." When the dam is finished, the spillway will be 



174 Panama Past and Present 

closed, and then the tremendously heavy rainfall — from 
ten to fifteen feet a year — will fill the lake in less than 
a twelvemonth. All the surplus water will run off 
through the spillway, and as it runs it will pass through 
turbines and turn dynamos to generate electricity for 
operating the machinery of the Gatun Locks that wiU lift 
ships over the dam. 

These locks are in pairs, like the two tracks of a rail- 
road, so that ships can go up and down at the same time ; 
three pairs, like a double stairway, of great concrete 
tanks each big enough for a ship a thousand feet long, 
a hundred and ten feet wide, and forty-two feet deep 
to float in it like a toy boat in a bath-tub. You can get 
some idea of their size when you remember that the 
Titanic was only eight hundred and fifty-two feet long. 
Or, to put it another way: every one of these six locks 
(and there are six more on the Pacific side) contains 
more concrete than there is stone in the biggest pyramid 
in Egypt.^ The American people have been able to do 
more in half a dozen years than the Pharaohs in a cen- 
tury, for our machinery has given us the power of many 
myriads of slaves. 

And wonderful machinery it is at Gatun, both human 
and mechanical. It is not easy for a visitor, standing 
on one of the lock walls — which, as you can see from 
the diagram, is as high as a six-story house — and look- 
ing down into the swarming, clanging lock-pits, to see 
any system, but if he look closely, he can trace its main 

1 In the construction of the locks, it is estimated that there will be 
used approximately four million, two hundred thousand cubic yards 
of concrete, requiring about the same number of barrels of cem.ent. 
— Official Handbook of the Panama Canal. 



How We Are Building the Canal 177 

outlines. Up the straight four-mile channel from Limon 
Bay come many barges, towed either by sturdy sea-going 
tugs or an outlandish-looking, stern-wheel steamer called 
the Exotic. Some of these barges are laden with Port- 
land cement from the United States, others with sand 
from the beaches of Nombre de Dios, or crushed stone 




SECTIONAL VIEW OF A LOCK, AS HIGH AS A SIX-STORY BUILDING. 
The tube through which the water Is admitted is large enough to hold a 
locomotive. 

from the quarries of Porto Bello. (For both of these 
old Spanish ports are now alive again, helping in the 
building of the Canal, and every now and then one of our 
dredges strikes the hull of a sunken galleon, or brings 
up cannon-balls or pieces-of-eight.) ^ The cargoes of all 

iSee Appendix. 
9 



178 Panama Past and Present 

these barges are snatched up by giant unloader-cranes 
and put into storehouses, out of which, hke chicks from 
a brooder, run intelligent little electric cars that need no 
motormen, but climb of themselves up into the top story 
of the dusty mixing-house. Here, eight huge rotary 
mixers churn the three elements, cement, sand, and stone, 
into concrete, and drop it wetly into great skips or 
buckets, two of which sit on each car of a somewhat 
larger-sized system of electric trains, whose tracks run 
along one side of the lock -pits. Presently those skips 
rise in the air and go sailing across the lock-pit in the 
grip of a carrier traveling on a steel cable stretched be- 
tween two of the tall skeleton towers that stand on either 
side of the lock-site. When the skip is squarely above 
the one of the high steel molds it is to help fill, it is tilted 
up, and there is so much more concrete in place. 

When the last cubic yard has been set, the gates hung, 
and the water turned in, a ship coming from the Atlantic 
will stop in the forebay or vestibule of the lowest right- 
hand locks, and make fast to electric towing-locomotives 
running along the top of the lock- walls. No vessel will 
be allowed to enter a lock under her own power, for fear 
of her ramming a gate and letting the water out, as a 
steamer did a few years ago in the " Soo " Locks, be- 
tween Lake Huron and Lake Superior. Every possible 
precaution has been taken to prevent such an accident at 
Gatun. Any ship that tried to steam into one of the 
locks there, for any reason whatsoever, would first have 
to carry away a heavy steel chain, that will always be 
raised from the bottom as a vessel approaches, and never 
lowered until she has come to a full stop. Then the 



How We Are Building the Canal 181 

runaway ship would crash, not into the gates that hold 
back the water, but a pair of massive " Guard gates," 
placed below the others for this very purpose. 

'* The lock gates will be steel structures seven feet 
thick, sixty-five feet long, and from forty-seven to 
eighty-two high. They will weigh from three hundred 



Water 







A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF ONE OF THE NINETY-TWO PANAMA 
" BULL-WHEELS." 

This wheel was invented by Mr. Edward Schildhauer of the Isthmian Canal 
Commission. The wheel revolves horizontally and thrusts out from the side of 
each lock-wall a long steel arm that opens and closes one of the huge lock-gates. 
These gates are of the " miter " pattern, so called because, when closed, they 
make a blunt wedge pointing up-stream, like the slope of a bishop's miter. Ob- 
serve the curved and hollowed recesses in the lock-walls into which the open 
gates fold back, like the blades of a knife into the handle. There are, of course, 
two "bull-wheels"; one for each of the gates. 



to six hundred tons each. Ninety-two leaves will be re- 
quired for the entire Canal, the total weighing fifty-seven 
thousand tons. Intermediate gates will be used in the 
locks, in order to save water and time, if desired, in 
locking small vessels through, the gates being so placed 
as to divide the locks into chambers six hundred and 
four hundred feet long, respectively. Ninety-five per 



l82 



Panama Past and Present 



cent, of the vessels navigating the high seas are less than 
six hundred feet long." ^ 

You will notice that each leaf of a pair of these gates 
is sixty-five feet long, instead of fifty-five or half the 
width of a lock. When they are closed, they form a 
blunt wedge pointing upstream, and the pressure of 
the water only keeps them tighter shut. Finally, if all 
the gates were swept away, there would still remain the 




From Official Handbook, 
CROSS SECTION OF LOCK CHAMBER AND WALLS OF LOCKS. 



A — Passageway for operators. 

B — Gallery for electric wires. 

C — Drainage gallery. 

D — Culvert in center wall. 

E — Culverts under the lock floor. 



F — Wells opening from lateral cul- 
verts into lock chamber. 
G — Culvert in sidewalls. 
H — Lateral culverts. 



" emergency dam " at the head of each flight of locks, 
ready to be swung round and dropped into position like 
a portcullis. 

Once a ship is inside, the lower gates will be closed 
behind her by machinery hidden in the square center- 
pier, valves will be opeiied, and water from the lake will 
rush down the conduits in the walls and flow quietly in 
from below^ until it has reached the level of the lock 
above. Then the upper gates will open, and the electric 
locomotives, — there will be four of them to handle every 
big ship, one at each corner, — will go clicking and scram- 
bling up the cog-tracks carried on broad, graceful arches 

1 Official Handbook. 



How We Are Building the Canal 183 

from level to level, and then pull the ship through after 
them. In like manner will she pass through the two 
upper locks, and out on the wide waters of Gatun Lake, 
eighty-five feet above the level of the sea. 

The average time of filling and emptying a lock will 
be about fifteen minutes, without opening the valves so 
suddenly as to create disturbing currents in the locks or 
approaches. The time required to pass a vessel through 
all the locks is estimated at three hours ; one hour and a 
half in the three locks at Gatun, and about the same time 
in the three locks on the Pacific side. The time of pas- 
sage of a vessel through the entire canal (about fifty 
miles from deep water in one ocean to deep water in the 
other; forty from beach to beach), is estimated as ran- 
ging from ten to twelve hours, according to the size of the 
ship, and the rate of speed at which it can travel." ^ 

The time spent by a ship in the locks at Panama will 
be more than made up by the much greater ease and 
speed with which she will be able to navigate the rest of 
the Canal there, as compared with that at Suez, where 
steamers must crawl at a snail's pace, or the wash from 
their propellors will bring down the sandy banks; and 
two large liners cannot meet and pass without one of 
them having to stop and tie up to the shore. At no place 
on the Panama Canal will this be necessary, for even at 
its narrowest part — the nine miles through the Gaillard 
Cut — the channel will be three hundred feet wide at 
the bottom, giving plenty of elbow-room for the largest 
ships, and lined with concrete where it is not hewn out 
of solid rock. The under-water and sea-level sections 

1 Official Handbook. 



184 Panama Past and Present 

at either entrance will be five hundred feet wide, and 
through the greater part of the Gatun Lake, a ship will 
steam at full speed down a magnificent channel one thou- 
sand feet broad, with no more danger of washing the 
banks than if she were in the middle of the lower Ama- 
zon. 

To help night navigation, there will be long rows of 
acetylene buoys, so ingeniously made that the difference 
of a few degrees of heat regularly caused on the Isth- 
mus by the rising and setting of the sun, will serve to 
turn their light off and on, by expanding and contracting 
a little copper rod. This device, invented by one of the 
American canal employees, has been thoroughly tested, 
and found to work perfectly. Everywhere trim little 
concrete lighthouses, looking strange enough in the 
jungle, are being built, or, rather, cast in one piece, on 
wooded hilltops that will soon be islands. 

Already the yellow water is rapidly backing up, as the 
dam and the spillway gates are being raised. You can 
mark the spread of the lake by the gray of the dying, 
drowned-out trees against the green of the living jungle. 
Only in the channel and the anchorage basin has Gatun 
Lake been cleared of timber, and the greater part of it 
will be a mass of stumps and snags. The centuries-old 
trade-route down the Chagres has been wiped out, and 
more than a dozen little towns and villages, Ahorca 
Lagarto, Frijoles, San Pablo, Matachin,^ have been 
moved to new sites on higher ground. It was not easy 
to make the natives believe that these places that had 
been inhabited for hundreds of years would soon be un- 
1 See Appendix. 



How We Are Building the Canal 187 

der forty feet of water. Some thought the Americans 
were prophesying a second deluge. " Ah, no, Senores," 
protested one old Spaniard, " the good God destroyed 
the world that way once, but He will never do so again." 
The Panama Railroad, too, has been relocated for its 
entire length, except for two miles or so out of Panama 
City, and a little over four miles between Colon and 
Gatun. Both the former station and the old village at 
Gatun (which is the place where Morgan's bucaneers 
and the Forty-niners, and all the other travelers up-river 
spent the first night) are now buried under the huge 
mass of the Gatun Dam, The former line of the Pan- 
ama Railroad through the lake-bed, though double- 
tracked and modernized only a few years ago, has been 
completely abandoned. The new, permanent, single- 
track road swings to the east at Gatun, and runs on high 
ground round the shore of the lake to a bridge across the 
Chagres at Gamboa, a little above Bas Obispo. It was 
originally planned that the railroad should run from 
here through the Gaillard Cut on a " berm " or shelf, ten 
feet above the surface of the water, but the many slides 
caused this to be abandoned, and the line was built 
through the hills on the eastern side of the Cut. At 
Miraflores it runs through the only tunnel on the Isth- 
mus. Because of the very heavy cuts and fills, the re- 
location of the Panama Railroad has cost $9,000,000, or 
$1,000,000 more than building the original road, al- 
though the new line is about a mile shorter. It is very 
solidly built, with steel bridges, concrete culverts, steel 
telegraph poles, made of lengths of old French rails 
bolted together and set up on end, and embankments 



i88 Panama Past and Present 

filled with several million cubic yards of rock from the 
Cut. • 

Only a little rock was taken out of the Gaillard Cut 
by the French, most of their digging being what the 
engineers call '' soft-ground work." But the deeper 
part of the great nine-mile trench, which they left for 
the Americans to dig, is almost entirely a " hard-rock 
job." From Bas Obispo to Pedro Miguel (which every 
American on the Isthmus calls " Peter Magill ") it must 
be hewn and blasted out of solid stone. Row above row 
of steam or compressed-air drills are boring deep holes 
in the terraces beneath them, and gangs of men are kept 
busy filling these holes with dynamite. As much as 
twenty-six tons were used in one blast, when an entire 
hillside was blown to pieces, and twice every day, when 
the men have left the Cut for lunch or to go home, hun- 
dreds of reports go rattling off like a bombardment. 

Then they move up the great steam-shovels to dig out 
the shattered rock with their sharp-toothed steel " dip- 
pers " that can pick up five cubic yards or eight tons, 
at a time. Think how bulky a ton of coal looks in the 
cellar, and then imagine eight times that much being 
lifted in the air, swung across a railroad track, and 
dropped on a flat-car, as easily as a grocer's clerk would 
scoop up a pound of sugar and pour it into a paper bag. 
Boulders too large to handle conveniently are broken up 
with " dobey shots," small charges of dynamite stuck 
into crevices, and tamped down with adobe clay. So 
skilful are the steam-shovel men (all Americans), that 
they will make one of their huge machines pick up a lit- 
tle pebble rolling down the side of the Cut as easily as 



How We Are Building the Canal 189 

you could with your hand; and every one of them is 
racing the others, and trying to beat the last man's record 
for a day's excavation. The present record was made 
on March twenty-second, 19 10, when four thousand, 
eight hundred and twenty-three cubic yards of rock, or 
eight' thousand, three hundred and ninety-five tons were 
excavated in eight hours by one machine. There are 
one hundred of these steam-shovels on the Isthmus, and 
more than fifty of them in the Gaillard Cut, and to see 
them all puffing and rooting together, more like a herd 
of living monsters than a collection of machinery, is one 
of the most wonderful spectacles in the world. 

Sometimes steam-shovels will be caught and buried by 
a " slide," an avalanche of rock or a river of mud brought 
down by some weakness in the banks. Wrecking trains 
and powerful railroad-cranes are always kept ready to go 
to their rescue. The worst place is across the Cut from 
the town of Culebra, where forty -seven acres of hillside 
are crawling down like a glacier. This is the famous 
Cucaracha Slide, that began to trouble the French as long 
ago as 1884; and though two million cubic yards of it 
have been dug away, there is half as much more to come. 
Altogether, this slide and the twenty others will have 
brought twenty million cubic yards of extra material to 
be taken out of the Cut, by the time the Canal is finished. 
But our engineers have learned how to stop them, by 
cutting away the weight at the top of each slide, and that, 
and the pressure of the water in the finished canal, should 
keep the banks at rest. 

To carry away the rock and earth dug out by the 
steam-shovels, there is an elaborate railroad system of 



IQO Panama Past and Present 

several hundred miles of track, so ingeniously arranged 
that the loaded trains travel down-grade and only empty 
cars have to be hauled up hill. Much rock is used on 
the Gatun Dam, and also on the breakwaters at either 
end of the Canal, but most of the material excavated 
from the Cut is disposed of by filling up swamps and 
valleys. Every dirt-train (they would call it that on the 
Isthmus even if it carried nothing but lumps of rock as 
big as grand pianos), travels an average distance of ten 
miles to the dumps and has the right of way over pas- 
senger trains, specials, and even mail trains. Only for 
the President of the United States has the line ever been 
cleared. 

At the dumping-ground, each dirt-train is run out on 
a trestle, and unloaded in one of two ways. If it is com- 
posed of steel dump-cars, they are tipped up either by 
hand or compressed air. Most of the trains, however, 
are of big wooden flat-cars, raised on one side, and con- 
nected by steel flaps or *' aprons," so that a heavy steel 
wedge, like a snow-plow, can be drawn from one end of 
the train to the other by a windlass and cable, thus clear- 
ing all the cars in a jiffy. (It is great fun to ride on the 
big wedge when they are " plowing-off.") When the 
dirt begins to rise above the edge of the trestle, a loco- 
motive pushes up a machine called the " spreader," that 
smooths it out into a level embankment, and then another 
machine, the " track-shifter," picks up the ties and rails 
bodily, and swings them over to the edge of the new 
ground. Each of these machines does the work of hun- 
dreds of laborers. 

Two large machine shops, now at Gorgona and Em- 




LIDGERWOOD FLATS BEING UNLOADED 
Balboa Dumps, low tide, March, 1908. 




A SPREADER 
Balboa Dumps, low tide, March, 1908. 



How We Are Building the Canal . 193 

pire, but soon to be moved to Balboa, at the Pacific end 
of the Canal, are kept busy assembling new machinery 
brought down from the United States, and repairing the 
worn parts of the steam-shovels, the hundreds of loco- 
motives and thousands of cars. At Mount Hope, near 




From Official Handbook. 
MODEL OF PEDRO MIGUEL LOCKS. 

Colon, is a shipyard for the tugs and dredges of the 
Atlantic division, and a huge general storage yard and 
warehouse for everything from a ten-ton casting for a 
lock-gate to a box of thumb-tacks for fastening a blue- 
print of that gate to a drawing-board. Every necessary 
article is there and in its proper place; and the same is 



194 Panama Past and Present 

true of the tool-box of the smallest switch-engine. 
From the top to the bottom there is neither skimping nor 
waste, but an efficiency like that of a Japanese army in 
the field. 

At Pedro Miguel a ship from the Atlantic will begin 
the descent on the other side of the divide. The locks 
on the Pacific side are exactly like those at Gatun, ex- 
cept that instead of having all three pairs together, there 
is one pair here and two at Miraflores, with a little lake 
between. From Miraflores, the Canal is being dredged 
out at sea-level to its Pacific terminus at Balboa, where 
there will be great docks and warehouses and shipyards 
on land that has been made by filling in tidal marshes 
with dirt from the Gaillard Cut. As on the Atlantic 
side, the Canal will run four miles out under the sea to 
deep water ; and to protect it from storms, a breakwater 
is being built from the shore to Naos Island, in the Bay 
of Panama. It is both strange and appropriate that the 
Panama Canal should have one of its. entrances at this 
island, whose name, the Spanish word for " ship," re- 
minds us that three hundred and fifty years ago it was 
the port of the city of Old Panama. 



CHAPTER XIV 

HOW WE LIVE ON THE ISTHMUS TO-DAY ^ 

WHEN Bill Smith, steam-shovelman, went to Pan- 
ama in 1904, he wrote to his wife in Kansas City 
that it looked to him like a pretty tough camp. The 
food was bad and the water was worse, and there was n't 
enough of either. His quarters were in an old French 
house full of scorpions, and the only mirror he could 
find to shave himself in was a broken piece of window- 
glass tilted back against the wall. Some of the boys 
were living in tents, and others in native shacks with 
mud floors, thatched roofs full of snakes, and walls you 
could throw a cat through. There was no place for a 
man to go after he finished his day's work but a saloon 
full of bad liquor or a crooked gambling-house. Two 
of the men who came down with him had died of fever, 
and three more had gone back on the next boat north. 
But Bill Smith thought he would stick it out a little 
longer. It took more than a little courage to make that 
resolution in 1904. 

In 19 1 2, Bill is still on the Isthmus, and Mrs. Smith 
and the children are there too. They are living rent- 
free in a " Type 17 House," a neat little cottage that 
Uncle Sam has not only built for them, but also fur- 
nished, from the concrete piles it stands on, to the ventila- 
tor in the galvanized-iron roof. Grass rugs, mission 

1 Written in 1912. '^5 



196 Panama Past and Present 

furniture, silverware, bed linen, coal for the kitchen 
range, all are provided by the United States Government, 
to say nothing of free electric light, and a free govern- 
ment telephone. The wide veranda is screened with cop- 
per netting (iron would rust too quickly) to keep out 
the few mosquitos that have escaped Colonel Gorgas. 
The garden is planted with flowers provided by the quar- 
termaster's department, and a cement walk leads to the 
macadamized and electric-lighted street that eight years 
ago was covered with primeval jungle. 

They dine well at the Smiths', though virtually every 
mouthful of their food has to be brought by sea from 
New York or New Orleans, in ships fitted with cold- 
storage. From the great storehouse at Mount Hope, 
every morning a long train of refrigerator-cars crosses 
the Isthmus, and brings fresh supplies to the hotels and 
local commissaries in all the camps and towns. A 
bachelor, quartered in a hotel, comes down from his com- 
fortably furnished room that costs him nothing, to a 
meal that costs him thirty cents, and which he would be 
lucky to get in New York for less than a dollar. Mrs. 
Smith buys her meat and groceries at the commissary 
store at wholesale prices. But in neither case is anything 
sold for money. Everything is paid for with checks torn 
out of booklets issued to employees and charged against 
their salaries, and with these you can buy anything from 
a pair of khaki trousers to an ice-cream soda. For 
Uncle Sam began by supplying frontier necessities, and 
ended by providing every luxury that you would expect 
to find in a thriving community of ten thousand Ameri- 
cans. 




STREET OF MARRIED QUARTERS AT PEDRO MIGUEL. 




TYPICAL DINING ROOM IN ISTHMIAN CANAL 
COMMISSION HOTEL. 



How We Live on the Isthmus 199 

The life of the five thousand American engineers and 
clerks and foremen, and that of their wives and children, 
is very much like what it would be at home. Though 
it is summer all the year round, the temperature seldom 
rises above eighty-six, and it is always cool and pleasant 
at night. There are band concerts, and firemen's tourna- 
ments, — there is a well-equipped and efficient fire depart- 
ment, — and women's clubs, and church societies, and a 
Panama Canal baseball league. 

Hundreds of sturdy, sunburned American children 
(for though the English cannot raise healthy white chil- 
dren in India, we can in Panama) go galloping about 
on little native ponies, or study in the Canal Zone public 
schools. The pupils of the high school publish a 
monthly paper called the Zonian. Several patrols of 
boy-scouts have been organized, and they have the ad- 
vantage of a real jungle to scout in. 

Uncle Sam had no intention of becoming a benevolent 
landlord and caterer when he went to Panama to dig the 
Canal. But in order to get the best class of American 
workingmen, and keep them fit to do their best work, 
he had to keep adding one thing after another, until now 
there are government laundries, bakeries with automatic 
pie, cake, and breadmaking machines, electric-light 
plants, ice factories, plants for roasting coffee and freez- 
ing ice cream; a harness shop, livery stables, printing- 
press, and an official newspaper, the Canal Record. 

If Bill Smith were struck by a flying fragment of rock 
after a too-heavy blast in the Cut, he would find a first- 
aid package beside his seat on the steam-shovel, receive 
free treatment at Ancon or Colon Hospital, and spend 



200 Panama Past and Present 

his convalescence at the comfortable rest-home on the 
beautiful island of Taboga in Panama Bay. Instead of 
losing his pay in gambling, which is strictly forbidden 
and effectively kept out of the Zone, he and the other 
employees send home over a quarter of a million dollars 
worth of postal money -orders every month. He no 
longer spends his noon hours and evenings at a saloon, 
but at one of the Government club-houses or recreation- 
buildings, reading, bowling, playing basket-ball, and 
otherwise enjoying himself. Or he can drop into the 
lodge-room of his fraternal order, — as an " old Canal 
man " of 1904, Bill Smith would certainly belong either 
to the '* Incas," or the " Society of the Chagres." He 
works for union hours for better than union pay, and 
every year he and his family are given first-class passages 
at reduced rates to New York and back on one of the 
Government-owned ships of the Panama Railroad Steam- 
ship Line, and a six-weeks' vacation in the United States. 
Bill Smith is not a real man, but his name is the only 
thing about him that is " make-believe." He is a typical 
example of the employees on the " gold roll," virtually 
all of whom are American citizens. But even with such 
housing and treatment and an annual trip to colder and 
more bracing air, a northern white man could not do 
good pick-and-shovel work in the tropics. So the great 
bulk of the force, below the grade of foreman, is drawn 
from the warmer parts of the world. Because they were 
at first paid in Panamanian silver, whose face value is 
worth only half that of American gold, they are known 
as the " silver roll men." 

Of the thirty thousand and more common laborers, 




SHIFTING TRACK BY HAND. 




TRACK SHIFTING MACHINE. 



How We Live on the Isthmus 203 

the great majority are negroes from Jamaica or Barba- 
dos, or other parts of the British West Indies. They are 
very peaceable and law-abiding fellows, but exceedingly 
lazy, and unbelievably stupid. There is room in their 
heads for exactly one idea at a time, and no more. One 
of them was given a red flag by the foreman of a sec- 
tion-gang on the Panama Railroad, and told to go round 
the curve and stop any train that might come along, 
while they replaced a rail. He went to his post, and 
just as they had taken up the rail, a switch-engine came 
sailing round the corner, flew off the track, and nearly 
killed two men. When they asked the Jamaican why he 
had failed to flag it, he replied, " You told me to stop 
trains. That was n't a train, it was a locomotive." 

When the Irish-American foreman started to say what 
he thought of him, the Jamaican ran away to the British 
consul, and complained that he was being called names. 

These big, strong, black men have to be looked after 
like so many children. Before we stopped them, they 
used to sleep in their rain-soaked clothes, waste their 
lunch-money on perfumery or lottery-tickets, and come 
to their work half -starved and sickly. Now they get 
three good hot meals a day, besides better pay and quar- 
ters than they ever dreamed of in Jamaica. Besides, 
they have learned that if they do not work, we can get 
other men to fill their places. 

To stimulate the Jamaicans by competition, we have 
brought over several thousand peasants from Galicia, in 
the north of Spain, and these men, being strong and 
healthy and used to labor in a hot climate for a fraction 
of what they earn on the Isthmus, do very good work. 



204 Panama Past and Present 

Each of them gets twice as much as a Jamaican, and 
more than earns it. Many of the Gallegos stick to their 
picturesque flat velvet caps and gay sashes. Then there 
are Italians, and Greeks, and Armenians, and Turks, and 
French-speaking negroes from Martinique, and turbaned 
coolies from India, and ever so many more besides. 
There are no Chinese or Japanese coolies, because the 
Republic of Panama excludes them by law, as does the 
United States. But almost everywhere in the two cities 
and the Zone, you can find a prosperous Chinese store- 
keeper, who was a coolie in the days of de Lesseps. 

It is a motley and interesting crowd that throngs round 
the pay-car when it goes over the line twice a month. 
At every stop the men file up steps on one side of the car 
and down the other, past open counters piled high with 
silver and gold. (Several times the springs of the pay- 
car have been broken by the weight of its load of coin.) 
The men are paid, not by name, because most of them 
cannot write, and many of them often change their names 
whenever a new one strikes their fancy, but by the num- 
ber on the brass check which every employee carries at 
his belt. There has never been any attempt to " hold 
up " the pay-train, though it is only guarded by half a 
dozen policemen. But they are very bad men to start 
a fight with, these tall, bronzed ex-troopers of the United 
States Cavalry, in the smart olive-green uniform of the 
Zone Police. They are the men who have made brigand- 
age a lost art on the Isthmus, and taught the Panama- 
nians to vote with ballots instead of machetes and Mauser 
rifles. About two hundred and fifty of this efficient 
little military constabulary, much resembling the Ca- 



How We Live on the Isthmus 205 

nadian Northwest Mounted Police, keep the four hundred 
square miles of the Canal Zone as peaceful as. a New 
England village on Sunday morning. All the officers 
and first-class troopers of this force are Americans, and 
about seventy -five second-class troopers are Jamaican 
negroes, who have served in the British West Indian 
Constabulary, or the British West Indian Regiment. 
These are very fine, soldierly men, far more intelligent 
than the average Jamaican. They are used to police 
their own countrymen on the Isthmus, which they do 
with much more tact and less friction than an American 
could. 

Any one who mistakes the Canal Zone of to-day for 
a lawless frontier community is more than likely to find 
himself making roads with the rest of the chain-gang. 

There are three United States Circuit Courts on the 
Isthmus, and the three justices sit 
together as the Supreme Court 
of the Canal Zone. As a rule, 
they sit without a jury, for most 
of the laborers come from coun- 
tries where jury trials are un- 
known. Interpreters skilled in 
many tongues are as much needed 
as in the police courts of New 
York. A code of laws has been 
put in force, to take the place of the clumsy and cruel old 
Spanish laws we found when we came to the Isthmus. 
A penitentiary at Culebra contains such prisoners as are 
not working on the roads. If a convict breaks jail, there 
is no place for him to run to, for on each side of the 




SEAL OF THE CANAL 
ZONE. 

From Official Handbook. 



206 Panama Past and Present 

Canal Zone stretches almost unbroken jungle, and there 
is a Zone policeman standing at the gangway of every 
steamer. 

Roads were an unknown luxury on the Isthmus in 
1904, except for the muddy streets of the tow^ns and a 
few rough trails through the jungle. Now there are 
many miles of macadamized highway, with concrete 
drains and bridges, and some day these will be connected 
to form an automobile speedway from ocean to ocean. 
^ One of the first-built and best-known bits of road is the 
three-mile drive from Panama City out over the beautiful 
rolling plain of Las Sabanas, to where the red-roofed 
haciendas, or summer bungalows, of the native aristoc- 
racy stand under the palm-trees. Here the rich citizens 
of Panama City spend the dry season, in primitive shacks, 
all doors and no windows, that an American dry-goods 
clerk would turn up his nose at for a week-end camp. 
- But even the poorest of them has plenty of grounds 
round it and a more or less elaborate gateway, and if 
you do not go near enough to notice the sickly chickens 
peeking round the touring-car in the drive, and the fat 
women in loose wrappers shading themselves on the 
veranda, the effect is not so bad. 

When I was writing this book at my father's house in 
Ancon, in the dry season of 19 12, we used frequently to 
take a gallop on Las Sabanas in the afternoons. Very 
varied and interesting were the people we met on the 
road : pretty American trained-nurses riding astride, and 
rice-powdered senoritas leaning back in victorias; a 
farmer from the hills, with rude sandals on his feet and 
a three-foot machete thrust through his red sash, driving 



How We Live on the Isthmus 207 

three tiny donkeys laden with yams and cocoanuts; a 
string of motor-cars full of American tourists, bound for 
the ruins of Old Panama (they '11 be going there in 
trolley-cars before the Canal is opened) ; a big Zone 
Police trooper saluting the President of Panama in his 
heavy carriage, painted with the arms of the republic; 
and two black-robed priests talking to a sturdy negro 
boy, whose only covering was the water running down 
his back from the five-gallon Standard Oil tin he was 
carrying on his shoulder, by way of a bucket. Often, 
when we cantered home through the swarming negro 
suburb of Calidonia, and up over the high-arched bridge 
across the tracks at the Panama Railroad station, I 
thought how for a hundred yards that road had been 
covered with dead and dying men, when a charging 
column of revolutionists was raked by a machine-gun 
placed on that bridge and operated by an American soldier 
of fortune in the Colombian service. That was in the 
unsuccessful revolution of 1901. To-day that soldier of 
fortune is a drill- foreman in the Cut. 

At the Panama Railroad station (they are building a 
handsome new one of terra-cotta and concrete), you can 
take a " spickety " cab to any part of Panama City, or 
the American suburb of Ancon for ten cents, Amer- 
ican, or twenty cents, spickety. What is '* spickety " ? 
When the Americans first came to the Isthmus, the drivers 
of the native cabs (rickety little two-seated buggies 
drawn by ponies as big as rabbits) used to cry, "Me 
speak it, the English ! " which meant " I speak English," 
but sounded like " Me spickety English." So our men 
began to call their speech " spickety English," and their 



2o8 Panama Past and Present 

cabs " spickety cabs," and now everything Panamanian 
is spickety. 

On the side of Ancon Hill, a small volcano, extinct 
since prehistoric times, between the port of Balboa and 
the city of Panama, is the American settlement of Ancon. 
It is a very beautiful town, that has no named or 
numbered streets, but is like a garden laid out in terraces 
with pretty little houses here and there, and a big red- 
tiled administration building for the Governor, and the 
Canal Commissioners. Here, too, is the Ancon Hos- 
pital, built by the French, and a large hotel, called the 
Tivoli, that is run by the United States Government 
through the War Department. It was built as a social 
center for the Americans on the canal force, and they 
are charged two-thirds as much as the tourists that stop 
there. The Tivoli would be considered a very good 
summer hotel anywhere in the United States, and if you 
want to engage a room there during the dry season, when 
the flood of visitors is at its height, you had better cable 
in advance. 

Two white posts on either side of the road from the 
Tivoli to the railroad station mark the Zone line, and 
the place where a President of the United States first 
entered foreign territory. That was in 1906, when The- 
odore Roosevelt drove down the Avenida Central, and 
made a speech from the steps of the cathedral. 

The Avenida Central or Central Avenue — a hundred 
years ago they called it the Calle Real or the Royal Road 
— is the great thoroughfare of Panama City. It runs 
from the railroad station to the Cathedral Plaza. For 
the first mile or so it passes through the tawdry new 



How We Live on the Isthmus 211 

quarter that has shot up like a Western boom-town since 
1904, round what used to be the little suburb of Santa 
Anna, outside the city wall. The old church of Santa 
Anna — once the family chapel of a Spanish grandee — 
still stands on the plaza of that name, with a dance-hall 
on one side, a vaudeville theater on the other, and saloons 
all round it. 

A few blocks beyond Santa Anna Plaza, you pass 
a street-shrine with ever-lighted candles that marks the 
site of the landward gate, and enter the old part of the 
town. Here the houses have walls three feet thick, and 
narrow windows with very stout shutters, for, in the 
disorderly old days, it was frequently necessary to turn 
them into fortresses on short notice. Even the churches 
were loopholed for musketry, and they are still connected 
by underground passages with the cathedral in the center 
of the town. When you walk down one of the narrow 
streets at night, under the long double row of Spanish 
balconies, you half expect to see a file of halberdiers go 
clanking past in the moonlight, or to hear the " clink 
and fall of swords." But all you hear is a cheap phono- 
graph playing an American popular song of the year 
before last, and the only armed men you meet are self^ 
important little native policemen, about four and a half 
feet high. It takes several of them to arrest one 
drunken Canal laborer. 

This national police is the nearest approach to an army 
they have in Panama. On the site of the old Colombian 
barracks, the Panamanians have built a handsome 
Government Palace, that is a combination White House, 
Treasury Building, and National Theater. Whenever 



212 Panama Past and Present 

the President wishes to go to the theater, all he has to 
do is to walk down a short corridor running directly 
from his apartments to his official box. 

Over on the other side of the city, just across the 
street from Ancon, stands the new National Institute, 
that is to be the university and normal school of Panama. 
At present, its pupils have not advanced beyond the 
primary grades, which speaks eloquently of the lack of 
public education under the old regime, and the determi- 
nation of the Panamanians that their children shall not 
grow up in ignorance. 

Some of the other " improvements " the Panamanians 
have made are, unfortunately, in much worse taste. 
They have painted the time-mellowed cathedral and 
most of the churches — the oldest of which was built 
in 1688 — until they look like brand-new suburban villas ; 
they have clapped a tin roof over the moss-grown tiles 
of the lovely little chapel on Taboga Island, turned the 
ruined Jesuit monastery into an apartment-house, and 
are now proposing to tear down what is left of the 
Church of San Domingo, with its famous earthquake- 
defying " flat arch," that is the wonder of every visiting 
engineer and architect. Even if they care nothing for 
the monuments of their own past, any European hotel- 
keeper could tell the Panamanians that they would make 
more money by exhibiting their ruins to American tour- 
ists than by tearing them down. 

Almost everybody you meet on the streets of Panama 
wears American ready-made clothing, and there is almost 
nothing in the stores but cheap American goods. Every 
year a few ship loads of German-made curios and im- 



How We Live on the Isthmus 213 

itation Panama hats are imported to sell to the tourists. 
The finest and softest of the so-called " Panama " hats 
— the kind you can fold up and put in an envelope with- 
out cracking them — are made in Ecuador, and a coarser 
sort in Peru. No Panama hats are made in Panama. 
In fact, there are no manufactures there of any sort, and 
therefore, as everything must be imported, there is only 
a low tarifif. As a result, you can sometimes buy Chinese 
silks or European novelties for less than you would pay 
in the U'nited States, and there are one or two little shops 
where genuine Ecuador hats are sold for a quarter of 
what they would bring in New York. Or, if you are 
very lucky, you may be able to pick up a necklace of old 
Spanish goldsmith's work, but there are not many of 
those left. Most of the things that are shown you on 
the Isthmus as '' old Spanish " are about as genuine as 
the " old Spanish gun " on that part of the sea-wall called 
Las Bovedas, not far from where the fishermen beach 
their boats at low tide, and the townspeople walk out and 
hold a market on the sea-bottom. This cannon — which 
they will tell you was used against the bucaneers — is a 
Parrott rifle of the type used in our Civil War, and has 
stamped on one of its trunnions the date '' 1864." 

From the founding of the city to the present day, the 
heart and soul of Panama has been the Cathedral Plaza. 
Here the Isthmus declared its independence from Spain, 
and, later, from Colombia. After the latter event, an 
attempt was made to change the name of the square to 
'' Independence Plaza," but the new name has failed to 
stick. The cathedral was built about the middle of the 
eighteenth century by a negro, who, though born the son 



214 



Panama Past and Present 



of a poor charcoal burner, was the first of his race to 
become the bishop of this, the oldest diocese on the 
American continent. It is a bit startling to American 
eyes to see, in the ground-floor of the episcopal palace, 
the offices of the National Lottery. The drawing takes 
place every Sunday, between mass and the bull-fight. 




PARROTT RIFLE, ON THE SEA WALL, PANAMA CITY. 
Relic of American Civil War, usually mistaken for an old Spanish gun. 



Needless to say, there is much more taken in during the 
week from the many who buy tickets, than is paid out 
to the few who win prizes. This lottery is a shame and 
a curse to the Republic of Panama, but if our neighbors 
see fit to tolerate it, it is no affair of ours. Selling lot- 
tery-tickets or holding any such cruel sports as bull-fight- 



How We Live on the Isthmus 217 

ing or cock-fighting, is strictly forbidden in the Canal 
Zone. The worst you can say of our Sundays there is 
that we let our wives and sisters go to church for us in 
the morning, and go ourselves to baseball games in the 
afternoon. 

The ' Panamanian Republican Band plays in the little 
park in the center of the Cathedral Plaza, every Sunday 
evening from eight to ten. Everybody from the Presi- 
dent to the boot-black turns out in his best, to walk round 
and round the space in front of the bandstand and look 
at the pretty girls, or sit and sip iced drinks at a table 
outside one of the cafes, and criticize the music. Like 
all Latins, they are born musicians, those little brown 
bandsmen, and they play well. 

But no music of theirs can stir an American's heart 
like that which he can hear at the camp of the Tenth 
United States Infantry at Empire, or of the Marines at 
Camp Elliott, when the men stand at attention as the flag 
comes slowly down, at the end of evening parade. Then 
you know what music means, when you hear a regimental 
band play " The Star-Spangled Banner," at sunset, down 
there in the jungle, two thousand miles from Home. 



\ 



CHAPTER XV 

HOW GENERAL GOETHALS HAS MADE GOOD 

THE task of building the Canal and governing the 
Canal Zone was placed, by an act of Congress in 
March, 1904, in the hands of the Isthmian Canal Com- 
mission, a board of seven men, appointed by the Presi- 
dent, and responsible to him through the Secretary of 
War. Rear-Admiral John G. Walker, an officer on the 
retired list of the United States Navy, who had already 
been at the head of two earlier commissions appointed 
to study and compare the Panama and Nicaragua canal- 
routes, was made the chairman. Major-General George 
W. Davis was made the Governor of the Canal Zone. 
The other five members of the Commission were expert 
engineers, and, in July, John F. Wallace became the Chief 
Engineer. 

The Walker Commission held office for a little more 
than a year. Under its leadership, law and order were 
firmly established in the Zone, many valuable surveys 
were made, a little dirt dug, the nucleus of an operating 
force collected, and the fight against fever begun by 
Dr. Gorgas. Under the circumstances, it was a very 
creditable year's work. For, instead of being given 
plenty of money and left undisturbed to organize its 
campaign against the jungle, the Isthmian Canal Com- 
mission was expected to make bricks, not only without 

21S 



How General Goethals Made Good 219 

straw, but almost without clay. Instead of realizing that 
millions of dollars' worth of machinery must be bought, 
the dirt and disease of four centuries scrubbed away, and 
a great army of men enlisted, drilled, housed, and fed. 
Congress could think of nothing but the danger of an- 
other scandal like that of the de Lesseps Company, and 




j/MC/ZVC OCCAM 



CROSS-SECTION OF THE ISTHMUS ON CANAL ROUTE. 

SO doled out money in grudging driblets, while the 
American people kept crying, " Make the dirt fly! " with 
the same thoughtless impatience with which the people 
of the North cried, ''On to Richmond!" before Bull 
Run. The Walker Commission gave it up in the spring 
of 1905. 

The second Isthmian Canal Commission had for a 
chairman Mr. Theodore P. Shonts, a railroad president; 
but most of the active work was left to the Chief En- 
gineer, Mr. John L. Stevens. To his skill as a practical, 
self-taught railroad-builder is due the scientific, labor- 
saving arrangement of the hundreds of miles of construc- 
tion tracks over which the dirt-trains run to the dumps. 
Under Mr. Stevens — " Big Smoke Stevens " they called 
him, for he burned up cigars like Grant in the Wilder- 
ness — the record for a month's excavation was brought 
up to a million cubic yards, the type of canal was finally 
settled on, and General Gorgas finished his fight against 



220 Panama Past and Present 

yellow fever. But in the spring of 1907, Mr. Shonts 
and Mr. Stevens both resigned. 

Handling a large v^orking force, especially one doing 
rough work in the open, is very much like commanding 
an army in the field. And an army commanded by a 
commission of seven men has exactly six generals too 
many. Realizing this, President Roosevelt decided to 
make the head of the third Isthmian Canal Commission 
not only its chairman, but also the Chief Engineer, the 
President of the Panama Railroad and the Governor of 
the Canal Zone. One man was made commander-in- 
chief; to stay there until he had finished the job. 
That man was Lieutenant-Colonel George Washington 
Goethals,^ United States Army Engineering Corps. 

Born in Brooklyn, New York, June 29, 1858, of a 
family that had come from Holland to America only a 
few months before, he graduated second in his class 
from the United States Military Academy at West Point 
in 1880. This placed him among the honored few at the 
head of each class that are appointed to the engineering 
corps. Since then, General Goethals had spent his time 
in building locks, dams and irrigation ditches in the West, 
and coast-fortifications in the East, as instructor in engi- 
neering at West Point, chief engineer of the First Army 
Corps in the war with Spain, and as a member of the 
general staff in Washington, before he was sent to 
Panama. 

The new commissioners were ordered to make their 
headquarters on the Isthmus and live there ten months 
in the year, instead of trying to dig the Canal from a 

1 Pronounced " Go'-thals," with a broad a and the accent on the 
first syllable. 



How General Goethals Made Good 221 

comfortable office-building in Washington, D. C. There 
is no room here either for a full list of the many different 
commissioners — mostly officers of the engineering corps 
■ — who were appointed at this time or later, or for the 
barest outline of the good work that each has done. 
Colonel Sibert at Gatun, Colonel Gaillard in the Culebra 
Cut,^ Civil Engineer Rousseau, U. S. N., Colonel Hodges, 
Colonel Devol, and Mr. Williamson are among the many 
who have made their names honored on the Isthmus and 
among the fellow-members of their profession. But the 
man whose name will go down to history as the builder 
of the Panama Canal is General Goethals. 

Soon after the General came to the Isthmus, an em- 
ployee complained that almost no work was being done 
on his new house, although it was very far from com- 
pleted, and he had been promised that it would be ready 
for his family in six weeks. Next morning General 
Goethals went there himself, and spoke to the carpenter- 
foreman in charge. 

" You will have this house ready for use in six weeks." 

" I'll try my best, sir, but — " 

" That was not my order. You will have this house 
ready, for use, in six weeks. Do you understand? " 

Six weeks later the family moved in. 

This is General Goethal's way, both in big things and 
little. He goes to the spot, sees what is needed, gives a 
plain, direct order, and gets results instead of excuses. 
Every morning in the week he goes out on the line, not 
as his French predecessor did, in a private car drawn by 

1 Now called " Gaillard Cut " in memory of that officer, who died 
just after the water was turned in. 



222 



Panama Past and Present 



a locomotive, but in a swift automobile mounted on 
flanged wheels, that looks like a taxicab disguised as a 
switch-engine. This motor-car is painted the regulation 
light yellow of Panama Railroad passenger-coaches, and 
you can scare a shirker out of a wet-season's growth by 
yelling, " Here comes the Yellow Peril ! " But when the 




1(111! 



THE BRAIN WAGON. 
Also known as the " Yellow Peril " to the canal employees. 

Yellow Peril — also known as the " Brain Wagon " — 
does come by, as likely as not it is empty ; for the General 
frequently drops off to take a closer look at a steam- 
shovel, or a group of compressed-air drills, or a new 
drainage-ditch, or anything else that has attracted his 
interest. Presently he will come past, perched on top of 
a loaded dirt train, or walking at a good swinging pace 
over rough railroad ties and slippery fragments of 




From a photograph, copyright, by Pa 

MAJOR-GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON GOETHALS. 



How General Goethals Made Good 225 

splintered rock. In the afternoon he does his office 
work, and it is often late at night when he switches off 
the light over his desk. 

The time to see General Goethals at his best is on Sun- 
day morning, when he sits in his dingy office at Culebra 
to give justice to all who come and ask for it. It is a 
scene as simple and as impressive as that of the good 
King Haroun-al-Raschid hearing his people's troubles, 
and judging between them, by the gate of Bagdad. 
Every man or woman who has a complaint of ill-treat- 
ment, or a suggestion for the improvement of the work, 
can walk in and tell it to the man at the top. Where 
else in the world could a laborer's wife, who is tired of 
getting tough meat from the butcher, say so to the head 
of a great business — a business so great that its monthly 
pay-roll is over $2,000,000 — and have him not only 
listen to her courteously, but also attend to the matter 
himself ? 

General Goethals considers it part of his duty to make 
sixty-five thousand men, women and children satisfied 
with their houses, the furniture and plumbing therein, 
their food as supplied by the commissary or served at the 
hotels and messes, their washing as done by the govern- 
ment laundry, their amusements at the baseball parks, 
club-houses and band concerts, their chapels and lodges, 
the railroad and steamship service, the electric-light 
meters, the dentists, and even the icemen, — in the tropics 
at that. Everything, from the building and fortifying 
of the Canal, to explaining to Mrs. Jones why Mrs. 
Smith, whose husband gets twenty dollars less salary a 
month than hers, has received two more salt-cellars and 



226 Panama Past and Present 

an extra rocking-chair from the district quartermaster, 
rests on his shoulders, and he bears it all with a smile. 

He watches and cares for his men as a trainer cares 
for his athletes, he has coached and drilled them till the 
forty thousand move together with the smooth team-play 
of a champion team ; and he has breathed into the whole 
great organization the fighting spirit of its captain. He 
has proved himself a born fighter and leader of men, 
not by the number of lives he has taken — for he has 
never been to war — but by the battles he has won 
against the desert and the jungle. He has not worn his 
uniform since he came to Panama. But in spite of 
snow-white hair and civilian clothes, and more than 
thirty years' absence from the parade-ground. General 
Goethals is no shapeless, desk-chair warrior, but a man 
to inspire the words of Bret Harte's priest: 

' Now, by the firm grip of the hand on the bridle, 
By the straight line from the heel to the shoulder. 
By the curt speech, — nay, nay, no offense, son, — 
You are a soldier. 

President Lowell, of Harvard University, in confer- 
ring on General Goethals the honorary degree of doctor 
of laws, spoke of him as follows: 

" George Washington Goethals, a soldier who has set 
a standard for the conduct of civic works; an adminis- 
trator who has maintained security and order among a 
multitude of workmen in the tropics; an engineer who 
is completing the vast design of uniting two oceans 
through a peak in Darien." 




STEAM SHOVEL LOADING FLAT CARS. 




STEAM SHOVEL HANDLING A LARGE BOULDER. 



CHAPTER XVI 



JANUARY FIRST, 191 5, is the date set for the offi- 
cial opening of the Panama Canal. Unlike de 
Lesseps, who first announced positively that the Canal 
would be opened in a very short time, and then began to 
discover difficulties and make postponements, our en- 
gineers carefully studied the task before them, figured 
out that they could finish it by the first of June, 19 14, 
and then added six months' extra time, to make sure. 
On the first of June, 1912, the excavation was more than 
seven-eighths completed, and the locks and dams were 
not far behind. 

When asked if the Canal would not be opened ahead 
of schedule time, Colonel Goethals replied, " Some time 
in September, .1913, I expect to go over to Colon, take 
the Panama Railroad steamer that happens to be at the 
dock there, and put her through the Canal. If we get 
all the way across to the Pacific, I '11 give it out to the 
newspapers, and if we don't, I '11 keep quiet about it." 

It is interesting to note that this first voyage of a ship 
across the American continent may take place four hun- 
dred years to a month, and perhaps to a day, after Bal- 
boa's discovery of the Pacific. Though the Canal will 
then be informally opened, a great deal more work will 
have to be done on it before it will be completely finished. 

1 Written in 1912. 229 



230 Panama Past and Present 

The operating force will have to learn how to work the 
huge gates and elaborate sluices, and pilots must know 
how to take ships through the new waterway. To give 
them practice, as well as to accommodate commerce, 
vessels will be allowed to pass through the Canal during 
this period, at their owners' risk. The final test will be 
at the official opening, when a great fleet of American 
and foreign warships, led by the President of the United 
States in the Mayflower^ and followed by a long line of 
yachts, excursion steamers, and merchant craft, will all 
pass through the Canal in procession. May the spirits 
of Columbus and Balboa be there to see ! 

But when we are done with the saluting and cham- 
pagne-drinking, and speechifying (orators almost invari- 
ably refer to the Panama Canal as '' mingling the waters 
of the two oceans," in spite of its having a high-level, 
fresh-water lake in the middle), what good is the Canal 
going to do us? What return are we going to get on 
the three hundred and fifty million dollars it hast cost 
us? 

It is much easier to prophesy than to make your 
prophecies come true, as was proved in the case of the 
Suez Canal. Most people declared that it would be an 
utter failure, and instead it has made its stockholders 
rich ; others thought it would restore the old commercial 
supremacy of the Mediterranean, but the people who 
most benefited by it were the English, who had taken 
no part in building it and made fun of the French for 
doing so; and finally, there were many unexpected re- 
sults of the opening of the Suez Canal, that no one had 
dreamed of. For instance, it brought the Philippines 



What the Future May Bring Forth 231 

so much nearer Spain that many more Spaniards went 
out there to make their fortunes, and they robbed the 
natives so energetically that the latter started a series of 
insurrections that did not end until after the islands be- 
came American. No man can tell what the ultimate 
results- may be of the opening of the Panama Canal. 
But the benefits which we expect to derive from it may 
be divided into two classes : military and commercial. 

Even if it should prove an utter failure commercially, 
the Canal would still be worth all it has cost us, for mil- 
itary purposes alone. Without it, Uncle Sam is in the 
position of a householder who has to run around the 
block to chase a tramp out of the back yard. With it, 
we can keep our navy concentrated in one powerful fleet, 
and move it from the Caribbean to San Francisco, or 
back again, in a couple of weeks. More than two months 
was required for the battle-ship Oregon to steam at full 
speed round South America from San Francisco to 
Cuba, where she was sorely needed at the outbreak of 
the Spanish-American War. Had the Panama Canal 
been in existence in 1898, she would have had to go only 
four thousand, six hundred miles, instead of thirteen 
thousand, four hundred, and she would have been ready 
to meet the enemy's fleet six weeks earlier — and a lot 
of things can happen in the first six weeks of a modern 
war. 

To prevent any foreign fleet from capturing the Isth- 
mus, and using the Canal against us, heavy fortifications 
are being built at both the Atlantic and Pacific ends. 
This work is being done by Lieutenant George R. 
Goethals, the elder son of the builder of the Canal. 



232 Panama Past and Present 

More than twelve million dollars is to be spent in build- 
ing great concrete forts and gun-pits on the islands and 
headlands, and arming them with batteries of twelve- 
inch mortars and fourteen-inch disappearing-guns. 
Most formidable of all will be the gigantic sixteen-inch 
gun, now at Sandy Hook, that can throw a shell, capable 
of sinking the stoutest dreadnaught, fof more than 
twenty miles. Without these forts to keep them at a 
respectful distance, a few blockading vessels would have 
our fleet at their mercy as it came down the narrow 
channel in single column, or they might bombard the 
locks at Miraflores or Gatun. But modern battle-ships 
are too costly to be risked in a direct attack on coast- 
fortifications, which are usually captured by landing an 
army at some other point, and attacking the forts from 
the landward side, as at Port Arthur. For that reason, 
a permanent garrison is to be kept in the Canal Zone, 
of a brigade of infantry, a squadron of cavalry, and a 
battalion of field artillery, besides the gunners in the 
forts. 

Every lock will be defended by earthworks against 
an attack overland. The operating machinery will be 
safely stowed inside the square center-pier (see diagram 
on page 182), beneath a thick concrete ceiling that 
should protect it from any bombs dropped from hostile 
aeroplanes. (It would be much easier for our soldiers 
to launch their own aeroplanes from a parade-ground or 
the broad top of a lock-wall, than for an attacking force 
to launch theirs from the deck of a ship.) The Gatun 
Dam is so thick and the lock-gates so many that there is 
very little danger of any one's blowing them all up and 






W-''"' «•'-■'. -'■■t^^ 




What the Future May Bring Forth 235 

letting the water out of the lake. To keep spies from 
dynamiting the gates, the locks will be lighted by elec- 
tricity at night, and guarded at all times by sentries. In 
case of an attack on the lock-guard by a strong body of 
men, reinforcements could be quickly brought, by road, 
rail, or water, from the central camp at Culebra. Here 
the main body of the garrison is to be encamped, across 
the Canal from the present town of Culebra, which, to- 
gether with nearly all the rest of the settlements in the 
Canal Zone, is to be abandoned, both because of the re- 
location of the railroad, and for military reasons. The 
entire country will be allowed to grow up again into 
thick jungle, through which no civilized army, encum- 
bered with horses and cannon, could cut a path without 
giving our men plenty of time and warning to prepare 
a very warm reception. 

It is a strange and melancholy fact that we in the 
twentieth century should deliberately let our borders 
grow up into forests to keep our neighbors at a distance, 
even as our barbarous German ancestors did, two thou- 
sand years ago. Some day humanity may become suffi- 
ciently civilized to establish universal peace. But until 
then, we must not forget that Panama has always been 
seized and held by the strong hand. The Isthmus to-day 
is a thousand times richer and more tempting a prize 
than it was in the time of Drake or Morgan, and though 
piracy has gone out of fashion, war has not. When we 
can turn the regular army into a police force, sell the 
navy for old iron, and take the big guns from Sandy 
Hook and the Golden Gate, we can leave the Panama 
Canal to be protected by the Zone Police, — but not be- 



236 Panama Past and Present 

fore then. So much for the military side; now for the 
commercial. 

A model town of concrete houses is to be built at 
Balboa for the operating force. Here will be the offices 
of the permanent Canal headquarters, and barracks for a 
battalion of marines, who may be needed to keep drunken 
stevedores and sailors from breaking up the toy police 
force of Panama City. An anchorage basin is being 
dredged and lined with an elaborate system of concrete 
docks, and the hundreds of acres of new land that have 
been made by filling in tidal swamps with earth and rock 
from Gaillard Cut will some day be covered with ware- 
houses, that should pay a very profitable rental to Uncle 
Sam. Electricity for lighting the streets, heating the 
electric stoves in the houses, and operating the cargo- 
cranes and other machinery, will be supplied by the spill- 
way power-plant at Gatun (see page 174). Here at 
Balboa will be concentrated the present machine-shops, 
the commissary with its cold-storage plant and bakery, 
and the Government laundry, which now plans to take 
the soiled linen from a ship at one end of the Canal, and 
send it back clean, via the Panama Railroad, before the 
vessel reaches the other side of the Isthmus. What with 
these, and the handy tanks and pipe-line of the Union 
Oil Company of California, and his own dry-docks, coal- 
bunkers, and barges, Uncle Sam will be able to supply 
every ship going through the Canal with anything from 
a sea-biscuit to a new propeller-shaft. Not only will 
these superior accommodations attract commerce to Pan- 
ama that would otherwise go to Suez, but some day this 
peaceful, profitable trade may be worth more to us than 



What the Future May Bring Forth 237 

money can tell, when a fleet of transports comes hurry- 
ing through with empty bunkers, or a battered dread- 
naught limps into Balboa shipyards, to be sent back to 
the fighting line. Professor Emory R. Johnson, Special 
Commissioner on Panama Canal Traffic and Tolls, says, 
in his' report to the Secretary of War : 

" The distance from New York to San Francisco, by 
way of the Straits of Magellan, is 13,135 nautical miles,^ 
by way of Panama, 5,262 miles, the Canal route being 
y,^y2) rniles shorter. The saving between New Orleans 
and San Francisco is greater — 8,868 nautical miles — 
the Magellan route being longer and the Canal route 
shorter from New Orleans than from New York. The 
Canal will reduce the distance from New York to the 
Chilian nitrate port, Iquique, 5,139 nautical miles, to 
Valparaiso 3,747 miles, to Coronel 3,296, and Valdivia 
about 2,900 miles. For New Orleans and other Gulf 
ports, the reduction is greater." It is only 1,395 niiles 
from New Orleans to Colon, while from New York to 
Colon it is 1,974 miles. 

The Pacific coast of the United States is the region that 
expects to be most immediately benefited, and for that 
reason the Panama Pacific Exposition is to be held in 
San Francisco in 191 5. California oranges and lemons 
and Oregon apples can be shipped much more cheaply 
in refrigerator-ships than in refrigerator-cars, while the 
saving on wheat, coal, lumber, and other heavy freight 
is even greater. 

Most of the passenger traffic will still go by rail, as 

^A nautical mile is 6,080 feet long; a statute or land mile, 5,280 
feet long. 



238 Panama Past and Present 

an express train can go from New York to San Francisco 
in four days, while the fastest steamer would take two 
weeks. But many of the emigrants from Europe, that 
now crowd into the tenements of New York, will prob- 
ably sail through the Canal directly to the Pacific coast, 
where there is only too much room for them. 

On the Atlantic coast, New Orleans plans to combine 
the traffic through the Canal with a great revival of the 
Mississippi River trade, while every port from Boston to 
Galveston claims to be in the most direct path to Pan- 
ama and to have the best railroad facilities behind it. 
Over a hundred million dollars is being spent on each 
coast in dredging channels, building docks, and other- 
wise getting ready for Panama. The effects should be 
felt, in lower freight rates and prices, in the farthest 
inland parts of the United States. 

The Panama Canal will bring our Atlantic and Gulf 
coasts, and the whole Mississippi Valley much nearer 
China, Australia, and New Zealand, all hungry for 
American steel and coal and manufactured goods. Then 
there is the trade with South America, which proved 
so much more valuable than that of the west coast of 
North America, in the early days of the Panama Rail- 
road. But though the South Americans like our reap- 
ers and binders and other machinery, and are beginning 
to wear our ready-made clothes and shoes, they do not 
like our stupid, bad-mannered ways of doing business 
with them. We send them circulars and catalogues 
written in a language they cannot read, salesmen who 
cannot speak a word of Spanish, and goods packed in 
flimsy cases that usually go to pieces on the voyage. If 



What the Future May Bring Forth 241 

an American schoolboy or office-boy, who is thinking of 
becoming a salesman, were to spend some of his time 
studying the Spanish language (or Portuguese, for 
Brazil), and learning something of the history, customs, 
etiquette (good manners sell more goods than " hustle," 
in the tropics) of the other republics in this hemisphere, 
he would be giving himself some of the training that the 
English and German salesmen are put through before 
they are sent to South or Central Amxcrica, where they 
have built up an immensely profitable trade. A genera- 
tion ago, Horace Greeley said, " Go West, young man, 
go West ! " To-morrow the word may be, " Go South ! " 
Eventually, the Panama Canal may help restore the 
long-lost American merchant marine. At the outbreak 
of the War of 18 12, more than ninety per cent, of Amer- 
ican goods were carried in American ships; in 1912, we 
paid a freight bill of over two billion dollars to foreign 
shipowners. At the outbreak of the Civil War, we had 
the greatest merchant marine in the world; fifty years 
later, we had less than a dozen ships trading to foreign 
ports. This was due partly to the replacing of wooden 
sailing vessels with steel steamers, but more to our faulty 
navigation laws, — for steel can be made in Pittsburg 
more cheaply than anywhere else in the world. All the 
big European and Japanese liners are subsidized, or 
partly paid for, by the governments of their countries, 
who use them to carry the mails in time of peace, and 
for cruisers or troop-ships in time of war. If a great 
war should break out in Europe or Asia, many of these 
vessels would cease to come to our ports, and we should 
have a hard time doing business with the rest of the 



242 Panama Past and Present 

world. And if we went to war ourselves, our army and 
navy would be crippled for want of transports and col- 
liers. When we sent our battle-ship fleet around the 
world in 1907, its coal and provisions had to be carried 
in foreign ships, that would not be permitted to serve 
it in time of war. 

Yet to-day, when the Stars and Stripes are almost 
never seen on the high seas, except on a warship or a 
private yacht, we have more sailing vessels than any 
other country in the world. England, of course, has 
the greatest numbers of steamers, but who do you suppose 
has the second greatest? Neither Germany nor Japan, 
but the United States. That is because of the ships on 
the Great Lakes, and in the coastwise trade. Only 
American vessels are allowed to go from one American 
port to another. For that reason, American ships ply- 
ing between our two coasts will pass through the Pan- 
ama Canal without paying any tolls. The same will be 
true of all mail steamers, subsidized by the United States 
Government and liable for use in case of war.^ 

Otherwise, the Canal is to be for the peaceful use of 
all nations, without favoritism. A uniform toll of a 
dollar and a quarter a ton is to be charged on all ships 
passing through, whatever flag they sail under. ^ As most 
of the European governments have been in the habit of 
paying the tolls at Suez on liners belonging to their sub- 
jects, they will probably do the same at Panama. With- 
out some such assistance, American shipowners will 
probably find it more profitable to stick to the trade be- 

1 Written 1912. These exemptions were abolished by act of Con- 
gress June 15, 1914. 

2 See Appendix. 



What the Future May Bring Forth 243 

tween our two coasts — and those of Mexico and Central 
America on the way — without venturing to South 
America and the Far East, where a hundred years ago 
the sea was white with the tall sails of the Yankee 
clippers. 

What effect will the opening of the Canal have on 
the Republic of Panama? The money spent there dur- 
ing the years w^hen it was being built has brought great 
prosperity to the Isthmus, but that source of revenue will 
soon come to an end. It would not be surprising if a 
period of " hard times " were to follow, for that was 
what happened as soon as the Panama Railroad was 
finished in 1855, and travelers began to cross the Isth- 
mus in a few hours instead of a week. Undoubtedly 
most of the traffic will pass through the Canal without, 
breaking bulk, and the Panamanian merchants will have 
Uncle Sam to compete with in the sale of everything but 
picture postcards and souvenirs to tourists. But Pan- 
ama has an excellent chance to become prosperous, by 
supplying the ships that pass through with fresh beef, 
fruit, and vegetables. On the broad, fertile prairies of 
the Province of Chiriqui (between the Canal Zone and 
Costa Rica), there is the best of grazing for cattle, while 
everything can be grown there, from bananas and 
oranges at the sea-level, to apples and other northern 
fruit in the hills. The United Fruit Company is doing 
a great trade at the Atlantic port of Bocas del Toro, and 
many Americans are beginning to settle near David, the 
capital of the province. 

Though it has an area as big as the State of New 
York, with its twelve million inhabitants, the Republic 



244 Panama Past and Present 

of Panama has a population of only three hundred and 
fifty thousand. Most of these are negroes, with a slight 
admixture of Indian blood, being the descendants of the 
Spanish slaves or workmen on the railroad or the Canal. 
Nearly all the white blood, as well as most of the wealth 
and business of the country, is concentrated in a small 
aristocracy, sometimes called the " Ten Families." If 
Chiriqui should begin to fill up with American farmers 
and cattlemen, a situation would be created very much 
like that in Texas in the early part of the nineteenth 
century, requiring the greatest tact on the part of the 
United States Government. 

Across the Canal Zone, at the South American end 
of the Republic, things are very much to-day as they were 
four hundred years ago, in what was then called Darien, 
and is now spoken of as " the San Bias country." Here, 
as in the heart of the Florida Everglades, and in certain 
parts of South America, the red man is still supreme. 
He does not bother us in the Canal Zone, and we do not 
bother him. He is well supplied with the white man's 
weapons. Masters of trading-schooners that have plied 
up and down the San Bias coast for thirty years have 
seen from their decks rich stretches of hardwood jungle 
and fertile prairie, and have noticed the heavy gold 
ornaments worn by the Indians who paddled out to barter 
with them; but the traders have not gone ashore to in- 
vestigate. No white man or negro may set foot in the 
San Bias country after sunset under penalty of death, by 
tribal law. When President Mendoza of the Republic 
of Panama went up the coast in a United States Govern- 
ment tug in 1908, he saw the Colombian flag flying above 



What the Future May Bring Forth 247 

an Indian village some miles on his side of the Panama- 
Colombian border, and the Indians would not let him 
land even to protest to their chief about it. The San 
Bias have no use for white men : there is not a mission- 
ary, or a trader, or a half-breed in their country, and no 
white, man has ever gone through it from Panama to 
South America.^ Miss Annie Coop, an American mis- 
sionary, visited the San Bias country for a short time in 
1909, and hopes to be permitted to return there soon 
and establish a school, for while the tribal law excludes 
white men, it says nothing about white women. But 
neither the strictest tribal law nor the bravest tribal war- 
riors, have ever kept white men permanently out of a 
country where there was gold. Sooner or later, there 
will be another " gold-rush " ; a stampede of white men 
across this last frontier, outrages, treachery, and massa- 
cres on both sides, which the feeble Republic of Panama 
will be powerless to prevent, and which may force the 
armed intervention of the United States. Let us hope 
this may never come to pass. But it is not easy to keep 
white men on one side of a border, when there is gold 
on the other. As they were before Columbus came, so 
the Darien Indians are to-day, within fifty miles of 
w^here we are living in electric-lighted houses, and build- 
ing the Panama Canal. 

Soon the work will be finished and the long task done. 
Then the great working force will be broken up and 
scattered to the four corners of the earth, and the jungle 
will creep back and swallow up their houses as it has 
those of the Spaniards and the Frenchmen before them. 

1 See Appendix. 



248 Panama Past and Present 

But every American who has worked more than two 
years on the Canal will carry away with him, besides im- 
perishable memories of the biggest, cleanest job the 
world has ever seen, the medal you see reproduced on 
this page. It is made of bronze from one of the dredges 
abandoned by the de Lesseps Company, as the Victoria 
Cross is made of the bronze of captured cannon; and 
like it, it is given for brave and arduous service. The 
design, chosen by the canal-builders themselves, shows 
on one side the head of Theodore Roosevelt; on the 
other, a picture of the finished canal. Beneath is set 
the seal of the Canal Zone, a noble galleon, sailing full- 
fraught through the long-sought passage to the Indies; 
and above the mottq from that seal, "(^The land divided 
— the world united.^ 




THE PANAMA CANAL MEDAL. 



f 




GENERAL VIEW OF GATUN LOCKS. 

Showing bulkhead to keep water of sea level canal out of the lock-chamber 
during erection of the gates. 




COLLAPSIBLE STEEL FORM FOR CASTING CULVERT IN 
LOCK WALL. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE OPENING OF THE CANAL 

WATER was first turned into the Gatun Locks on 
September 26, 191 3. Several thousand canal em- 
ployees lined the lock walls to watch the muddy fountains 
spurt up out of the round openings in the dusty con- 
crete floors of the lock chambers. With the water came 
hundreds of big bull-frogs, sucked down through the 
sluices from the lake above, who swam round and round 
in comic bewilderment as the water-line rose higher and 
higher. When the water in the low^est lock was even with 
the surface of the sea-level canal outside, the gates were 
opened and the sea-going tug Gatun steamed in under her 
own power, for the electric towing-locomotives were not 
yet ready for service. General Goethals was not a pass- 
enger on the tug; but walked up and down the lock wall, 
receiving reports on how the valves and bull-wheels were 
working, and watching the Gatun as she was locked 
through to the lake 

Two weeks later, on October 10, President Wilson 
pressed a button in the White House, and started an elec- 
tric impulse which w^as relayed southward from cable- 
station to cable-station till it reached and exploded eight 
tons of dynamite, blowing up the Gamboa Dike and ad- 
mitting the water of Gatun Lake into the Gaillard Cut. 
The Cut had already been partially flooded, that the in- 

251 



252 Panama Past and Present • 

rush of water might not be too severe. About twenty 
minutes after the dike was blown up, two daredevil young 
Americans in a dugout " shot the rapids " from the lake 



THE DREDGING FLEET AT CUCARACHA. 

into the Cut. One of these young men was a private in 
the Marine Corps; the other was Lindon Bates, Jr., who 
was killed while trying to save some children on board 
the Lusitania. 

But after the last man-made dike had been cleared 
away, the Canal was still closed to navigation by a great 
natural barrier. This was our old friend, the Cucaracha 
Slide, which had slid down and almost completely blocked 
the bottom of the Cut in January, 19 13. So little im- 
pression had the steam shovels been able to make on it in 
the next nine months that it was decided to turn in the 
water and finish the job with floating dredges. A small 
fleet of ladder- and dipper-dredges were brought up 
from the Atlantic entrance, while up through Miraflores 
and Pedro Miguel locks came the most powerful dredge 
In the world, the Corozal, with her endless chain of 



The Opening of the Canal 25 



o 



buckets that can bring up ten thousand tons a day, and 
dig through soft rock without previous blasting. This 
vessel was built at Renfrew, Scotland, and made the 
voyage across the Atlantic and round South America 
to the Pacific entrance of the Canal under her own steam. 

Moored as closety together as possible, the dredges 
attacked the great mass of soft clay from both sides. 
Double crews and electric light enabled the work to go 
on by night as well as by day. The excavated material 
was loaded into barges, towed away by tugs, and dumped 
into Gatun or Miraflores Lake, outside the ship channel. 

By May, 19 14, a channel had been dug through the 
Cucaracha Slide deep enough to permit barges to be 
towed through from ocean to ocean. These barges 
carried freight from steamers of the American-Hawaiian 
Steamship Line, which company had been prevented from 
trans-shipping by the Tehuantepec Railroad because of the 
revolutionary outbreaks in Mexico. 

After the dredges had removed 2,767,080 cubic yards — 
an average of 286,239.78 cubic yards per month — from 
the Cucaracha Slide, its forward movement ceased and 
the way was opened for an ocean-going ship to make the 
long-looked- forward-to passage from sea to sea. This 
trip was made by the Cristobal, of the Panama Railroad 
Steamship Line, on August 3, 19 14. Her sister ship, the 
Ancon, passed through on the fifteenth, carrying a large 
party of army officers, Panamanian dignitaries, and their 
wives and families. Again General Goethals was not a 
passenger, but watched the vessel's passage from the 
shore, moving from point to point in his railroad motor. 

The Panama Canal was now declared open to the com- 



254 Panama Past and Present 

merce of the world. During the first twelve months 
there passed through it 1258 vessels, carrying 5,675,261 
'tons of cargo, the tolls on which amounted to $4,909,- 
150.96. 




U.S.S. OHIO PASSING CUCARACHA SLIDE, JULY i6, 1915. 

The Isthmian Canal Commission was abolished on 
January 2y, 19 14. Two days later. President Wilson 
nominated Colonel Goethals first Governor of the Panama 
Canal. This appointment was speedily and unanimously 
confirmed by the Senate, and on March 4, 19 15, the 
Governor was promoted to his present rank of Major- 
General. 

But his work was not yet done at Panama. In Octo- 
ber, 191 5, the Canal was completely blocked by two for- 
midable slides directly opposite each other on the banks 
of the Cut, a little distance north of Gold Hill. Both of 
these slides were of the type known as " breaks," where 



The Opening of the Canal 257 

the weight of the bank causes the underlying material to 
snap off and give way like an overloaded floor-beam. In 
each of these cases, about eighty acres of ground sank 
almost straight down to an average depth of twenty feet. 
Squeezed between its sinking banks, the bottom of the 
Canal naturally rose up, forming first an island, then a 
peninsula, and finally a complete barrier. As fast as 
the dredges dug this away, more material came down 
from each side, in regular waves. The tops of these 
slides were too broken to permit of their being lightened 
by steam-shovels, nor could anything be done by washing 
the earth down the side of the slope away from the Cut, 
with powerful hydraulic nozzles, as was possible at Cucar- 
acha. The only course was to keep the dredges digging 
away, till there was nothing more left for them to dig. 
It was not until April, 19 16, that the Canal was reopened 
to commerce. 

Because of these slides and also because of the great 
war in Europe, which made impossible the assembling 
of an international fleet, there was no formal opening of 
the Panama Canal by the President of the United States. 
In somewhat the same way, the elaborate festivities in 
celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal were cut 
short forty-five years earlier, by the outbreak of the 
Franco-Prussian War. 



APPENDIX 

COLUMBUS AND LIMON BAY 

There is no doubt that Columbus sailed into this bay, 
where to-day is the Atlantic entrance of the Panama Canal, 
on his fourth and last voyage, in 1 502 ; or that he was the 
first white man to enter it. But there is no historical foun- 
dation for the generally accepted story that Columbus gave 
this body of water the name of '' Naos " or the " Bay of 
Ships." Centuries afterwards, the bay was called by the 
Spaniards " Naos," and by the English and Americans 
" Navy Bay," a name gradually displaced during the last 
fifty years by the present one of " Limon (lemon) Bay." 
The earliest map on which the name " Naos " appears is 
Tirion's, in the middle of the eighteenth century. All the 
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps that give this bay 
any distinctive name, call it " Puerto de las Galeras," or 
" Port of the Galleys." Neither Ferdinand Columbus nor 
any other contemporary historian of the fourth voyage men- 
tions it at all. 

MATACHIN 

The name of this village is popularly supposed to be de- 
rived from the Spanish verb " matar," to kill, and " Chino," 
or Chinese ; and to refer to the large number of coolies that 
died of fever or committed suicide there, during the con- 
struction of the Panama Railroad. But the same village with 
the same name is marked on the seventeenth-century maps 

259 



26o Appendix 

of the Spaniards and the bucaneers, hundreds of years be- 
fore the first Chinese set foot on the Isthmus. ** Mata- 
chin " is an old Spanish word meaning "'* Butcher." Very 
likely the village was so called because some one lived there 
who slaughtered cattle and supplied the travelers up-river 
with fresh meat. There is no authority for the other story. 

PANAMA AND THE PAN-AMERICAN 
RAILROAD 

There is no way of reaching Panama by railroad from 
either North or South America. Some day, a line may be 
built through the length of the three Americas, from Alaska 
to Patagonia, but at present (1912) there are long stretches 
where even a horse could not go. Except for a rough over- 
land trail to Costa Rica, the Canal Zone is virtually an 
island, surrounded on two sides by water and on the other 
two by the jungle. Proposals have been made for a railroad 
to run from Panama City to David, the capital of the Prov- 
ince of Chiriqui, and for another through the San Bias 
country to South America, but there is small probability of 
their being built in the immediate future. Any railroad 
crossing the Canal will have to build an expensive bridge 
between Gold Hill and Contractor's Hill, high enough to 
clear the masts of the tallest ships. 

A story is told of a visiting Congressman, who had been 
seasick all the way from New York to Cristobal. When he 
saw " P. R. R." on the Panama Railroad freight cars on 
the dock, he exclaimed : " I 'd never have come this way 
if I 'd known there was a Pennsylvania Railroad station so 
handy!" 

SPILLWAY, GATUN DAM ^ 

The spillway is a concrete-lined channel 1,200 feet long 
and 285 feet wide cut through a hill of rock nearly in the 
1 Official Handbook. 



Appendix 263 



center of the dam, the bottom being ten feet above sea level 
at the up-stream end and sloping to sea level at the toe. 
Across the up-stream or lake opening of this channel a con- 
crete dam has been built in the form of an arc of a circle 
making its length 808 feet although it closes a channel with 
a width of only 285 feet. The crest of the dam will be 69 
feet above sea level, or 16 feet below the normal level of the 
lake which is 85 feet above sea level. On the top of this 
dam there will be 14 concrete piers rising with their tops 
115^10 feet above sea level, and between these there will be 
mounted regulating gates of the Stoney type. Each gate 
will be of steel sheathing on a framework of girders and will 
move on roller trains in niches in the piers. They will be 
equipped with sealing devices to make them watertight. 
Machines for moving the gates are designed to raise or 
lower them in approximately ten minutes. The highest 
level to which it is intended to allow the lake to rise is 87 
feet above sea level, and it is probable that this level will be 
maintained continuously during wet seasons. With the lake 
at that elevation, the regulation gates will permit of a dis- 
charge of water greater than the maximum known discharge 
of the Chagres river during a flood. 

THE SPANISH MAIN 

" The Spanish Main " did not mean any part of the sea, 
but part of the mainland of America, including the Isthmus 
of Panama, and the northern extremity of South America. 
This was what the Spanish settlers called " Terra Firma," 
to distinguish it from the islands of the West Indies, and 
what Drake and Morgan meant when they spoke of " the 
Spanish Main." Later, this easily became confused with 
the word " main," meaning the sea. Gilbert, in his poem 
on the sack of Old Panama, uses the word in its former 
sense : 



164 Appendix 



"His Catholic Majesty, Philip of Spain, 
Ruled over the Indies, both islands and Main." 

PIECE OF EIGHT 

This famous coin, familiar to all readers of " Treasure 
Island," was called by the Spaniards a *' peso de ocho 
reales"; a name which the English half-translated, half- 
parodied into " piece of eight." It is almost impossible to 
give anything like an exact value for the old Spanish coins, 
but a " real " has usually been worth a little more than an 
American nickle, so that a coin worth eight reales would be 
worth from forty to fifty cents. The " piece of eight " is 
the modern Mexican and Panamanian dollar, worth half as 
m.uch as one of ours. Our dollar sign is derived from the 
sign used to indicate " pieces of eight " in the old account 
books; an eight canceled with two vertical lines (to keep it 
from being added up with the other figures), thus: $. This 
sign became $, because it is quicker and easier to write an 
S, than an 8. 

VALUE OF THE $40,000,000 FRENCH PURCHASE 

A careful official estimate has been made by the Canal 
Commission of the value to the Commission at the present 
time of the franchises, equipment, material, work done, and 
property of various kinds for which the United States paid 
the French Canal Company $40,000,000. It places the total 
value at $42,799,826, divided as follows : 

Excavation useful to the Canal, 29,708,000 cubic yards $25,389,240.00 

Panama Railroad Stock 9,644,320.00 

Plant and material, used and sold for scrap 2,112,063.00 

Buildings, used 2,054,203.00 

Surveys, plans, maps and records 2,000,000.00 

Land 1,000,000.00 



Appendix 265 

Qearings, roads, etc $ 100,000.00 

Ship channel in Panama Bay, four years' use 500,000.00 

Total $42,799,826.00 



CANAL WORK, MAY i, 1912 

EXCAVATION 

Cubic yards. 

Total of completed Canal (Revised Estimate) 195,323,379 

Accomplished — vi^hole Canal 168,486,884 

Remaining — whole Canal 26,836,495 

Accomplished — whole Canal, during year ending May i, 

1912 30,736,364 



Total of Culebra Cut 89,444,005 

Accomplished — Culebra Cut 79,295,530 

Remaining — Culebra Cut 10,175,103 

Accomplished — Culebra Cut, during year ending May i, 

1912 11,223,500 

SLIDES. 

Number along Culebra Cut 18 

Number in motion 3 

Number dead 15 

Area covered (acres) 165 

Amount removed (cubic yards) 15,100,000 

Amount still to be removed (cubic yds. estimated) 1,830,000 

LOCKS. 

Gatun: 

Concrete, 93 per cent completed. 

Concrete laid (cubic yards) 1,861,884 

Concrete to be laid (cubic yards) 138,116 

Pedro Miguel: 

Concrete, 92 per cent completed. 

Concrete laid (cubic yards) 827,214 

Concrete to be laid (cubic yards) 65,000 



266 Appendix 

MiraHores: 

Concrete 6i per cent completed. 

Concrete laid (cubic yards) ■. 866,178 

Concrete to be laid (cubic yards) .-. 557,ooo 



APPROPRIATIONS AND EXPENDITURES 

APPROPRIATIONS TO APRIL I, I912. 

For Canal $293,566,928.76 

For Fortifications 3,000,000.00 

EXPENDITURES TO APRIL I, I912. 

For Canal 251,276,491.12 

For Fortifications 669,156.1 1 

CANAL STATISTICS 

Length from deep water to deep water (miles) 50 

Length from shore-line to shore-line (miles) 40 

Bottom width of channel, maximum (feet) 1000 

Bottom width of channel, minimum, 9 miles, Culebra Cut 

( feet) 300 

Locks, in pairs 12 

Locks, usable length (feet) 1000 

Locks, usable width (feet) no 

Gatun Lake, area (square miles) 164 

Gatun Lake, channel depth (feet) 85 to 45 

Culebra Cut, channel depth (feet) 45 

Excavation, estimated total (cubic yards) 182,537,766 

Excavation, amount accomplished May i, 191 1 (cubic 

yards) I37,750,520 

Excavation by the French (cubic yards) 78,146,960 

Excavation by French, useful to present Canal (cubic 

yards) 29,908,000 

Excavation by French, estimated value to Canal $25,389,240 

Value of all French property $42,799,826 

Concrete, total estimated for Canal (cubic yards) 5,000,000 

Time of transit through completed Canal (hours) 10 to 12 

Time of passage through locks (hours) 3 

Relocated Panama Railroad, estimated cost $9,000,000 



Appendix 269 

Relocated Panama Railroad, length (miles) 47.1 

Canal Zone, area (square miles) 448 

Canal and Panama Railroad force actually at work 

(about) 35,000 

Canal and Panama Railroad force, Americans (about) 5000 

Cost of Canal, estimated total $375,000,000 

Work begun by Americans May 4, 1904 

Date of Completion Jan. i, 1915 

The Clayton-Bulwer treaty, made between the United States and 
Great Britain in 1850, after the two countries had been brought to 
the brink of war by their conflicting claims to the control of the 
trade-routes across Panama and Nicaragua, and, particularly, of 
any canal that might be built across either isthmus, provided that 
neither country should have exclusive control of such a canal, nor 
erect fortifications along it, but that they should jointly control 
it, and guarantee its neutrality. This treaty barred the way to the 
canal for fifty-one years, for neither country was anxious to build 
a canal that was to be for the equal benefit of the other country, 
whether the other country helped or did nothing. In 1901, the 
Clayton-Bulwer treaty was replaced by the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, 
in which Great Britain withdrew from the partnership, leaving the 
United States in full control. At first, Great Britain held out for 
a neutralized canal, that was to be open to the merchant ships and 
war ships of all nations at all times. But that meant that if a for- 
eign country went to war with the United States, we should have 
to let the enemies' fleet pass unmolested through our own canal to 
attack our sea-ports, and' the storm of popular disapproval was so 
great that this clause was withdrawn. No express permission was 
given the United States to erect fortifications, but neither was it 
expressly forbidden. Great Britain insisted, however, before yielding 
up her rights under the old treaty, that the merchant ships of all 
countries be guaranteed the same treatment in time of peace. This 
is the basis of the English protest against letting American ships 
in the coastwise trade pass through the canal without paying toll. 
The American rejoinder is that these ships are engaged in a purely 
domestic trade, and therefore it is a purely domestic question. It 
is very unlikely that the United States will withdraw from this 
position. 



270 Appendix 



PANAMA CANAL TOLL RATES. 

By the President of the United States of America. 

A PROCLAMATION. 

I, William Howard Taft, President of the United States of 
America, by virtue of the power and authority vested in me by the 
Act of Congress, approved August twenty- fourth, nineteen hundred 
and twelve, to provide for the opening, maintenance, protection and 
operation of the Panama Canal and the sanitation and government 
of the Canal Zone, do hereby prescribe and proclaim the following 
rates of toll to be paid by vessels using the Panama Canal. 

1. On merchant vessels carrying passengers or cargo one dollar 
and twenty cents ($1,20) per net vessel ton — each one hundred 
(100) cubic feet — of actual earning capacity. 

2. On vessels in ballast without passengers or cargo forty (40) 
per cent less than the rate of tolls for vessels with passengers or 
cargo. 

3. Upon naval vessels, other than transports, colliers, hospital ships 
and supply ships, fifty (50) cents per displacement ton. 

4. Upon Army and Navy transports, colHer, hospital ships and 
supply ships one dollar and twenty cents ($1.20) per net ton, the 
vessels to be measured by the same rules as are employed in deter- 
mining the net tonnage of merchant vessels. 

The Secretary of War will prepare and prescribe such rules for 
the measurement of vessels and such regulations as may be neces- 
sary and proper to carry this proclamation into full force and effect. 

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the 
seal of the United States to be affixed. 

Done at the city of Washington this thirteenth day of November 
in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and twelve and 
of the independence of the United States th? one hundred and thirty- 
seventh. 

[SEAL.] Wm. H. Taft. 

By the President: 
P. C. Knox, 
Secretary of State. 



INDEX 



Abandaned French machinery, 
127. 

Ada, 67. 68, gi, 92 

Administration Bnilding, 208. 

Africa, circnmnavigated, 37. 

Agramonte, Dr Aristides, 157. 

Ahorca Lagarto, 184. 

Alonso, Juan, 57. 

AUigators, 25. 

Amador, Dr. Manuel, Guerrero, 
160. 

American children, 199. 

Amercian Dredging and Con- 
tracting Company, 127. 

American intervention, 133, 139, 

147, 149- 

American merchant marme, 241. 

Ancon Hill, 208. 

Ancon Hospital, 121, 150, 165, 
199, 208. 

Ancon, town of, 13, 207 

Anopheles mosquitoes, 165. 

Anson, Admiral, 94. 

Antigua, Santa Maria de la, 52, 
55. 56. 57. 62. 

Antonio, Babtista, 78. 

Ants, 25. 

Arabic ititerpretcrs, 42. 

Armadilloes, 21. 

Armenians, 204. 

Artigue, Sonderegger & Com- 
pany, 124. 

Asia, 36. 91. 

Aspinwall, City of, 105, T06 

Aspinwall, William H., 100. 

Atrato River, 31, 48. 58, 66. 

Avenida Central, 208. 

Australia, 238 

Ayora, Juan de, 65, 66. 



Bacon, Nathaniel, 133. 
Bahamas, 36. 



273 



Baldwin, J. L., 100, loi, 105. 
Balboa, port of, 148, 193, 194, 

236. 
Balboa, Vasco Nunez de, 51, 52, 

55. 56, 57, 58, 61 to 68, 88, 

133. 229. 
Bananas, 18. 
Band concerts, 199. 
Barbacoas Bridge, 106, 108, iii. 
Bas Obispo, 169, 187. 
Bastidas, Roderigo de, 42, 48, 52. 
Belgian locomotives, 124. 
Birds, 20. 

Biscaina, the, 41, 44. 
Bishop of Panama, 67, 68, 214. 
Bishop's Palace, 214. 
Black Death, the, 166. 
Black Swamp, the, 105. 
Bloodhounds, 61. 
Bocas del Toro, 243. 
Bogata, 112, 115, 133, 138, 139, 

143- 
Bobio, 27. 
Boston, 238. 
Boy Scouts, 199. 
Bradley, Captain, 83. 
"Brain Wagon," 222. 
Brazil, 241. 

Brigandage, 100, 138, 204. 
British East India Company, 92. 
Brooklyn, 220. 
Bucaneers, 80 to 86, 88, 91. 
Bull-'fights, 20, 214. 
Bull-wheels, 181. 

Cabilda, 79. 

Cableways, 178. 

Cacafiiego, the, 76. 

Calcutta, Black Hole of, 158. 

Caledonia Bay, 92. 

Calidonia, suburb of, 207. 

California, 100, 113, 236, 237. 



274 



Index 



Camp Elliott, 217. 
Campbell, Captain, 93. 
Canal Medal, 247. 
Canal Record, the, 199. 
Canal routes, 31. 
Canal Statistics, 256. 
Canal tolls, 242, 261. 
Xanal Zone, 148, 158,. 165, 169, 

204, 205, 208, 217, 218. 
Canal Zone Public Schools, 199. 
Cape Gracias a Dios, 43, 48. 
Cape Honduras, 43, 44 
Cape of Good Hope, -iT. 
Cape of Storms, 2>7- 
Capitana, the, 41. 
Careta, Indian chief, 57, 58. 
Cartagena, City of, 50, 73, p4, 

102. 
Caribbean, 137, 139, 231. 
Caribbean, dredge, 168. 
Carroll, James, 157. 
Castilla del Oro, 48. 
Cathedral, Panama-, 164, 208, 213. 
Cathedral, Old Panama, 84. 
Cathedral Plaza, 164, 208, 217. 
Cayuca, 27. 
Cement, 177. 

Central America, 148, 243. 
Chain-gang, 205. 
Chagres Fever, 165. 
Chagres River, 5, 32, 71, 78, 83. 

94, 98, 105, 159, 169, 187. 
Charles H, 86. 
Charles V, 32, 134. 
Chauncey, Henry, 100. 
China, 238. 

Chinese coolies, 107, 204. 
Chinese exclusion law, 204. 
Chinese merchants, 144, 204. 
Chiriqui Lagoon, 6, 43. 
Chiriqui, Province of, 43, 243, 

244. 
Chucunaque Indians, 27. 
Chucunaque River, 5. 
Churches, old, 212. 
Church societies, 199. 
Cimaroons, 73, 85. 
Club houses, 200. 
Cocaanuts, 17. 
"Coast of the Ear," 43. 
Coastwise trade, 242. 



Cold storage, 108, 150, 196. 
Colmenares, 56. 
Colombian flag, 244. 
Colombia, United States of, 115, 

137, 138, 140. 
Colon, City of, 9, 13, 106, 139, 

143, 144, 148, 160, 169, 193, 

237- 
Colon Hospital, 121, 150, 199. 
Columbus, Bartholomew, 37, 41, 

48. 
Columbus, Christopher, 36 to 48, 

76. 
Columbus, Ferdinand, 41, 43, 

44 
Commissary, 196. 
Comagre, Indian chief, 58, 61. 
Concrete, 178. 

Congress, Colombian, 140, 143. 
Congress, International Canal, 

116, 118. 
Congress, United States, 100, 

140, 148. 
Constitution of Colombia, 137. 
Constitution of Panama, 148. 
Constitution of the United 

States, 148. 
Contractors, under the French, 

124. 
Cantrelas brothers, 134. 
Conquistadores, 8, 137. 
Constantinople, captured, 37. 
Cordilleras del Bando, 5. 
Coronel, port of, 237, 
Cortez, Hernando, conqueror of 

Mexico, 34, 43, I33- 
Cosa, Juan de la, 50. 
Costa Rica, 4, 43, 243. 
"Creeping Johnny," 122. 
Cristobal, town of, 149, 169. 
Crocodiles, 22. 
Cruces, 71, 98. 

Cuba, 36, 124, 150, 157, 159, 167. 
Cucaracha Slide, 189. 
Culebra, 108, 225, 235. 
Culebra Cut, 114, 124, 150, 169, 

187 to 190. 
Culebra Penitentiary, 205. 
Cullen, adventurer, 32. 

Dabaiba, Golden Temple of, 58, 
66. 



Index 



275 



Dampier, Captain, 21, 91. 

Darien, canal route, 31. 

Darien region, 48, 78, 88, 91, 169. 

"Darien Song," the, 92. 

David, City of, 243. 

Davis, Major General George 

W., 218. 
Devol, Colonel, 221, 
Diaz, Bartholomew, 2>7' 
Dirt-train, 190. 
"Doaley Mass," the, 164. 
Drake, Sir Francis, 70 to yy, 80, 

81, 134- 
Dredges, 124, 127, 169. 
Dumping-grounds, 190. 
Dynamite, 188. 

Earthquakes, 4. 

East Indies, 36, Z7, 4i, 92, 130. 

East Indian coolies, 107, 204. 

Ecuador hats, 213. 

Eliot, President, of Harvard, 

157. 
Elizabeth, Queen, 70. 
Empire, 190, 217. 
Enciso, the bachelor, 51, 52, 55, 

56, 57. 61. 
Engineers, French, 124. 
Esquemeling, Jan, 86. 
Excavators, French, 124, 150. 
Exotic, the, 177. 

Fairy-stories, carried from East 

to West, ^7. 
Ferdinand, King, 48. 
Filibustering, 97, 143. 
Finlay, Dr. Carlos, 154, 
Fire Department, 199. 
Fish, 25. 
Flat arch, the, in the Church of 

San Domingo, 4, 212. 
Florida Everglades, 244. 
Flowers, 18. 
Fonseca, Bishop, 67. 
Fort St. Andrew, 92. 
Fortifications, 231. 
Forty million dollar purchase, 

140, 150, 256. 
Forty-niners, 98, 99, 100, 187, 
Fraternal orders, 200. 
Free Quarters, 195. 



French Canal, as proposed, 118. 
French Canal, cost of, 127. 
French Canal Company, 114. 
French Canal machinery, aban- 
doned, 127. 
French extravagance, 123. 
French freebocrters, 75, 91. 
Frijoles, 184 
Fundy, Bay of, 9. 

Gaillard Cut, see Culebra Cut. 
Gatun, 105, 169, 187. 
Gatun Dam, 169, 170, 232. 
Gatun Lake, 170, 183, 184. 
Gatun Locks, 174. 
Gatun Spillway, 170. 
Gaillard, Colonel, 221. 
Gallego, the, 41, 44. 
Gallegos, 203. 
Galleon Fair, the, 80. 
Galveston, 238. 
Gambling, 122, 195, 200, 214. 
Gamboa, 118, 187. 
Garrison, Colombian, 143. 
Garrison of Canal Zone, 232. 
Gasca, Pedro de la, 134. 
George III, 97. 
German-made curios, 212. 
Gilbert, the poet of the Isthmus. 

9, 159. 
Gisborne, adventurer, 32. 
Goethals, Lieutenant G. R., 231. 
Goethals, Colonel George W., 

218 to 226, 229. 
Goethe's prophecy, 130. 
"Gold Roll," 200. 
Golden Gate, the, 235. ' 
Gorgona shops, 100. 
Gorgas, Colonel William' C, 158 

to 167, 218, 219. 
Government ownership, 199, 225, 

Government of the Canal Zone, 
160, 164, 208, 218, 220. 

Governor of Panama, 84, 143. 

Greeks, 204. 

Greeley, Horace, 241. 

Guanin, mixture of gold and 
copper, 43. 

Gulf of Mexico, 130. 

Gulf of San Miguel, 61, 67, 91. 



276 



Index 



Guzman, Don Juan Perez de, 
84, 85. 

Haciendas, 2g6. 

Hacicndados, 138. 

Hardwood ties, iii. 

Haroun-al-Raschid, 225. 

Havana, 150, 154. 

Hawkins, Sir John, 70, 77. 

Hay, John, 148. 

Heated Rock in the Culebra 
Cut, 3. 

High Rates on the Panama Rail- 
road, III, 121. 

Hodges, Colonel, 221. 

Holy Ghost Orchid, 18. 

Hughes, Colonel, loi. 

Independence of Panama, 98, 

133, 144, 147. 
Iguanas, 22, 
Iquique, port of, 237. 
Isabella, Queen, 48. 
Isabel, Dona, wife of Ped'-a- 

rias, 65. 
Isle of Pines, 42. 
Isthmian Canal Commission, 

166, 208, 218 to 221. 
Isthmus, direction of the, 6. 
Isthmus Guard, the, 139. 
Italians, 204. 

Japan, 37, 38.. 
Japanese coolies, 204. 
Jaguar, 20. 

Jamaica, 47, 51, 81, 88, 92. 
Jamaican stupidity, 203. 
Jenkins, Captain, 94. 
Johnson, Professor Emory R., 
237- 

Khedive of Egypt, 116. 
Kissinger, John R., 157. 

"Land of the Cocoanut Tree," 9. 
Las Casas, 134. 
Las Sabanas, 206. 
Law, George, 100. _ 
Lazear, Jesse William, 157. 
Lepers, 164 



Lesseps, Count Ferdinand de, 
115 to 118, 121, 127, 128, i39j 
229. 

Light-houses, 184. 

Limon Bay, 44, 251, loi, 168, 

177. 
Lizards, 22. 

Lock Canal, 116, 169, 174. 
Locks, protection of, 232. 
Lock chambers, 182. 
Lock gates, 181. 
Loss of hfe, in building Panama 

Railroad, 107; in building 

French Canal, 123. 
Lowell, President, of Harvard, 

226. 
Lunatics, 164. 

Macana, 27. 

Machete, uses of the, 14, 17. 

Magellan, Straits of, 76, 88, 94, 

113, 237- 
Magoon, Governor Charles E. 

Magoon, 160. 
Manila, 34, 94. 

Malaria, 102, 121, 122, 159, 165. 
Manzanillo Island, loi. 
Marco Polo, 36. 
Marines, United States, 144, 217, 

236. 
Martiniquans, 204. 
Matachin, 184, 251. 
Mendoza, President, of Panama, 

244. 
Mexico, 34, 43, 243. 
Miraflores, 164, 194. 
Mississippi Valley, 3» 238. 
Monkey Hill, 105, 
Morgan, Sir Henry, 81 to 86. 
Mosquitoes, 26, 102, 122, 154, 

157, 158, 160, 163, 165. 
Mount Hope, 105, 193, 196. 
Mountains, 5. 

Natives, 26, 244. 

Naos, Island of, 88, 194- 

Nashville, United States gun- 
boat, 144. 

National Institute of Panama, 
212. 



Index 



277 



National lottery, 214. 

National Palace of Panama, 211. 

National Police of Panama, 211, 

Navy Bay, see Limon Bay. 

Nelson, Horatio, 97. 

New Edinburgh, 92. 

New French Canal Company, 

128', 140, 150, 256. 
New Granada, Republic of, 100, 

115, 133, 137, 138. 
"New Laws for the Indies," the, 

134- 
New Orleans, 196, 22^7, 238. 
New York, 92, 100, 108, 143, 168, 

22;7- 
New Zealand, 238. 
Nicaragua, ZZ, 43, 97, 116, 134, 

143, 218. 
Nicuesa, Diego de, 48 to 51, 55, 

56. 
Nombre de Dios> 56, 71, 72, 77, 

134, 177. 

Obaldia, Jose Domingo dc, 143. 
Ojeda, Alonsa de, 48 to 51. 
"Old Spanish Gun/' 213. 
Opening of the Canal, 229. 
Oregon, 100, 237. 
Oregon, United States battle- 
ship, 140, 231. 
Orinoco River, 38, 44. 
Ovando, 41. 

Oviedo, historian, 51, 68. 
Oxenham, John, 75, 76. 

Pan American Railroad, 252. 

Pacific Ocean, 58. 

Pacific Steam Navigation Com- 
pany, 113. 

Pacra, Indian chief, 61. 

Palo Seco, 164. 

Palos, 38. 

Panama, "Place abounding in 
fish," 25, 68. 

Panama, Bay of, 91, 194. 

Panama Canal, Z2; 98, 114, 116, 
118, 124, 127, 130, 150, 167, 
168 to 194. 



Panama Canal Baseball League, 

199, 217. • 
Panama, present city of, 88, 94, 

138, 139, 143, 144, 148, 150, 

160, 163, 164, 208 to 217. 
Panama, Old, 68, 69, 75, 77, 78, 

79, 84 to 87, 134, 194, 207. 
Panama, Gulf of, 6, 24^. 
"Panama" hats, 213. 
Panama Pacific Exposition, 237. 
Panama Railroad, 100 to 113, 

121, 144, 187, 203, 220, 222, 

225, 235, 236. 
Panama Railroad Steamship 

Line, 200, 229, 238, 243. 
Panama Railroad Station, Pan- 
ama City, 207. 
Panama Railroad Company, 100, 

105, III, 112, 113, 121, 138, 

144- 
Panama, Republic of, 144, 147, 

148, 243. 
Panama, State ofj loo, 137. 
Panama, prehistoric Strait of, 3. 
Panamanian Band, 164, 217. 
Parker, Captain William, 77. 
Patterson, James, 91, 94. 
Pay-train, 204. 
Pearl Islands, 80. 
Pedrarias the Cruel, 63 to 69, 

134- 
Pedro Miguel, 69, 188. 
Pedro Miguel Locks, 194. 
Peru, 58, 69, 71, 80, 94, 134, 213. 
Pharaohs, the, ZJ, i74- 
Philip II, 78. 
Philippines, 9, 80, 230. 
Pieces of Eight, 66, 177, 256. 
Pike, Robert, 75. 
Pineapples, 18. 
Pirates, 78, 91. 
Pizarro, Francisco, 51, 52, 68, 69, 

133. 
Pizarro, Ganzalo, 134. 
Plate Fleet, j},, 74, 94. 
Port Arthur, 232. 
Port of Provisions, 44. 
Porto Bello, 44, 55, yy, 78, 80, 81 
83, 88, 94, 97, 177. 



278 



Index 



President of Panama, 160, 164, 

207, 211, 217, 244. 
President of the United States, 

218, 190, 230. 
Pullman cars, 124. 

Quarries, 177. 

Rainfall, 169. 

Reed, Major Walter, 157. 

"Red bug," the, 26. 

Retrete, el, 44- 

Revolution of t688, 91.' 

Revolutions, earlier, m Panama, 

133, 137, 138, 139, 207. 
Revolution of 1903, I33. I43, I44. 

147, 148, 149. 
Rio Grande, the, 164. 
Roads, 5, 206, 235. 
Robber-barons, 133, 138. 
Rocky Mcfuntains, 130. 
Roosevelt, President Theodore, 

117, 147, 148. 208, 220, 247. 
Ross, Dr. Ronald, 165. 
Rousseau, Mr., Civil Engineer, 

U. S. N., 221. 
Royal Road, 71, 85, 94, 98, 208. 
Runnels, Ran, 139. 

Sandy Hook, 232, 235. 
Sanitaticm, Department of, 160. 
Santa Anna, Church of, 211. 
Santa Anna Plaza, 211. 
San Bias Indians, 27, 28, 90, 91, 

92, 148, 244. 
San Bias Hills, 169. 
San Bias canal route, 31. 
Santa Cruz, 65, 66, 67. 
Santo Domingo, Island of, 38, 

41, 49, 51, 1^' 
San Francisco, 99, 237. 
Santiago de Cuba, 150. 
Santiago de PaJos, 41. 
San Juan de Ulloa, 70, 77. 
San Lorenzo, Castle of, 78, 83. 

94. 
San Pablo, 184. 

San Sebastian, town of, 50, 52. 
Savannah River, 67. 



Sabanas, las, 206. 

Scorpions, 26, 195. 

Scotch colony in Darien, 91 to 

94. 
Scotch dredges, 124. 
Screens, 159, 196. 
Sea-level canal, 118, 169. 
Seasons, rainy, 10; dry, 13. 
Secretary of the Isthmian Canal 

Commission, 123. 
Secretary of War, 218. 
Ship railv^ay. Captain Eads's, 

34. 
Ship-subsidies, 241. 
Ship tunnel, 31, 35. 
Shonts, Theodore P., 219. 
Sibert, Colonel, 231. 
"Silver Roll," 200. 
Sisters of Charity, 122. 
Slaves, 79, 244. 
Slides, 189. 
Smith, Bill, steam-shovelman, 

195, 199- 
Smuggling, 80. 
Snakes, 21. 

Soldiers of fortune, 138, 207. 
"Sao" Locks, the, 178. 
South America, 140, 231, 238, 

243- 
South Sea, the, 6. 
Spanish America, 134, 137, 238. 
Spanish Amercian War, 140, 153, 

158, 220, 231. 
Spanish Main, 38, 72, 255. 
"Spickety," 207. 

Spillway power-plant, 174, 236. 
Spreader, 190. 

"Star and Herald," the, 100. 
Steam-shovels, 168, 188. 
Stegomyia mosquito, 158, 160, 

163, 165. 
Stephens, John L., 100, 102, 107. 
Stevens, John R, 159, 219. 
Strain, Lieutenant, V. S. N., 32. 
Suez Canal, 115, 183, 230, 236, 

242. 

Taboga, Island of, 88, 113, 114 
200. 



Index 



279 



Tarantulas, 26. 

Tartary, Great Kahn of, 42. 

Technical Cammission, 117, 118, 

127. 
Tehuantepec, 34. 
Tehuantepec Railroad, 35. 
Telegraph, the, 102. 
Telegraph-poles, iii, 187. 
Temperature, 3, 10, 199. 
"Ten Families," the, 244. 
Terra Firma, 38. 
Texas, 244. 
Tidal Basin, ii8j 127. 
Tides, difference in, 9, 118. 
Titanic, the, 174. 
Tivoli Hotel, the, 208. 
Toro Point Breakwater, 168. 
Torres, Colonel, 144. 
Totten, Colonel, 100, 102, 105, 

112. 
Tourists, 207, 212, 243. 
Towing-locomotives, 178. 
Track-shifter, 190. 
Trautwine, Mr., 100, 10 1. 
Treaty of 1846, the, 133. 
Trees, 13, I4- 
Turks, 204. 
Tuberculosis, 153. 
Tuyra River, 5. 
Type 17 House, 195. 

Underground passages, 211. 

United Fruit Company, 243. 

Union Oil Company of Califor- 
nia, 236. 

Union Pacific Railroad, 113. 

United States Army Engineer- 
ing Corps, 220. 

United States Army Medical 
_ Corps, 154. 

United States Canal Zone Cir- 
_ cuit Courts, 205. 

United States Government, 129, 
133, 140, 149, ISO, 208, 244. 



Unloader, 190. 

Uraba, Gulf of, 48, 50. 

Valdivia, port of, 237. 

Valparaiso, part of, 237. 

Vasco de Gama, 41. 

Vegetation, 13. 

Venta Cruz (see Cruces), 71, 75. 

Veragua, 44, 47, 48, 50, 80. 

Vera Cruz, 34, 70. 

Vernon, Admiral Edward, 94. 

Vespucci, Amerigo, 49. 

Volcanoes, 3. 

Wafer, Lionel, 91. 

Walker, Rear-Admiral John G., 
218. 

Walker Commission, 218. 

Wallace, Mr. John F., 218. 

War of 1812, 241. 

"War of Jenkins' Ear," 94. 

War of the Spanish Succession, 
93. 

Waterworks, 163. 

Watlings Island, 2^. 

West Indian negroes, 107, 128. 
203. 

West Point, 148, 220. 

William HI, 92. 

Williamson, Mr. B. S., Civil En- 
gineer, 221. 

Women's Clubs, 199. 

Wood, General Leonard, 157. 

Wyse, Lieutenant L. N. B., 114. 

Yams, 18. 

Yellow Fever, 97, 121, 153, 157, 

160, 163, 165, 167. 
Yellow Fever Commission, 157, 
Yellow Fever Immunes, 153. 
"Yellow Peril," the, 222. 
Yucatan, 42, 43. 

Zone Police, the, 204, 207, 235 







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